Quotes about locket, page 8
Anyone Can Say What They Feel
Anyone can say what they feel
but how few can sing what they dream.
You put your heart into any art
and people will follow you like a bloodstream.
In self defence against the omnipotence
of being interdependently originated,
you can substantiate your absence
to prove you're not living in the same world
we all do, but where's that going to get you in the end?
You can true your delusions anyway you want
but that's not going to clear you for the truth.
The destroyed see deeper than those who survived.
That man puts a straitjacket on
everytime he says he's arrived.
Just because it's absurd doesn't mean
it isn't believable. Me sitting here
writing this to a caste of albino stars
I haven't reconfigured into a constellation yet
because my imagination keeps shape-shifting me
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poem by Patrick White
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I Would Miss You Were You Not So Deep Inside
I would miss you if you weren't so deep inside.
I would send the fireflies out like a search party
to beat the bushes and the stumps to see where you hide
were you not the stars within that lead me home.
I would cry out in anger and tears, World, you are not fair,
were you not the mystic intimate of my indignation.
I would look upon the illuminated world
thriving in its garden, and accuse the sun of being blind
did I not see more in your eclipse, the abundance
of your darkness, than I do by the vacant light of day.
Let others bathe like birds in the fountainmouths
of happier lyrics, I drown in your watershed,
a starfish on the moon, and the darkness shines
like a nightsea the colour of your eyes. And there's a sky
full of shipwrecked constellations without lifeboats
that went down into fathomless time with all hands on board
like a cargo of bones that reached its destination
by giving them all up to you, like yarrow sticks
to the Book of Changes, whether you read them as such or not.
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poem by Patrick White
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The Moon A Blade Of Stillness
The moon a blade of stillness honed on the heart
of a cold, dark night
without lunacy, love, or forgiveness.
Indian tobacco and milkweed pods
like the fossils of shucked clam shells
in the middens of the Neanderthals
or the twisted wombs of fortune cookies
that were long ago cracked open
to spill their good fortune on the wind.
The morning dove of the loveletter flown
they’re left with nothing but the envelope.
The wind gathers and swirls gusts of snow
across the ice-glazed fields
as if someone were about to rail coke on a mirror
like the Milky Way
and blew it big time into a gust of stars.
Venus and the moon,
perfume on a wrist
with a wound and a scar.
The cold air slashes my nostrils.
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poem by Patrick White
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Sitting Here Becoming Whatever Drifts My Way
Sitting here becoming whatever drifts my way.
Cedar boughs smouldering in an attic to smoke the bats out.
Thought-watching without looking for the answer to anything.
Spiders like badges walking on the waters of my mind.
The autumn's new, but it's the same old passage of things.
Apples like bells in the trees of the steeples, shepherd moons
of sloppy solar systems strewn on the ground
with seeds that are going to take them down
a notch or two yet before they make a comeback.
Seven times down. Eight times up. Such is life.
I watch the picture-music flowing through my mind
like a home movie that's happening as fast as I am
playing the role of everybody else in the universe
all at once as if every ray of light incarnated
in the emanation of an essential existential insight
into the nature of every mystically specific human being
could all be traced back to the root of the same star.
And what does the star do when the many return to it
if not apocalyptically go supernova into transcendence.
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poem by Patrick White
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You Are Crazy
You are crazy and beautiful
and wounded and wild
and the youngest daughter
of a coven of poetic sea-witches,
and dangerous as the moon in your changes,
the fragrance of night
hovering over the blue star-honey
of your seductive hive of candles,
the skulls you drink from naked,
anointing the fire
with libations of blood and wine,
dancing to the passionate lament
of ancient serpents
unfolding their wings
like eras in the lives of stars,
constellations that have come and gone like leaves,
seasons that are only distant whispers
in the hourglass of the hills,
voices that have outlived the ears to hear them.
And we are no more contained
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poem by Patrick White
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Chewing On Memories Like Broken Mirrors In Her Sleep
Chewing on memories like broken mirrors in her sleep
tears of blood run from her eyes.
She doesn't know I'm watching
but I've got windows everywhere.
But for her
just for her
because nobody else cares
third eye satellites with unlimited airspace
in her choice of skies to match her eyes.
A haemorrhage of sunsets.
Fly little bird fly
as if you weren't the shattered sparrow
God took his eye off
when you fell.
Sometimes the mystic oversights
have more to say
about the great revelations of the world
than all the burning bushes in the valley of Tuwa.
Rumours and news.
Fly little bird fly.
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poem by Patrick White
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Lighting It Up And Blowing It Out
Lighting it up and blowing it out
I try to make my way through the dark
by beginning at the end
as if the coming and the going
were the same door
or good-bye were the first thing
you would say to a friend.
I approach things like a night stream
as if my death were already achieved
and behind me.
And all the atoms of my being
dancing like frenzied gnats
in the sunset glow of a last eye-beam
are certifiably primordial
and any one of them
when they lose it in the light
could begin a world.
And what can you say more of a life
that dreams of what it is
than it's the taste of the same wine
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poem by Patrick White
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Muskrat Skull, Albino Asteroid, Chunk of the Moon
Muskrat skull, albino asteroid, chunk of the moon
fallen to earth, ivory doorknob picked clean
by ants and wolves, half your teeth stacked like books
on a shelf behind the crescent moons of your fangs
and their reflections, as above so below,
that don't quite meet in the middle of the bridge
you're building like an engineer with overbite.
When I look down upon your cranium from above it's
a beautiful amphora, handles like arms at its side,
a woman hoisting her long skirt up to cross a river.
Musquash, you must be a holy food if they let the Catholics
eat you at Lent in place of fish because you spend
so much of your time aquatically. Do the wolves,
the owls, the foxes, the mink, the hawks, the fishers,
the feral dogs know they're enlightened
by the flesh of your body? You, alone, of all
the animals who tried and failed, the Gabriel
of the native creation myth that touched bottom
to bring back the starmud that made the earth,
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poem by Patrick White
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Promethean Contentions
My life the wardrobe of a shabby star; here,
take this carnelian pomegranate
that has hardened into a heart
and appease what blood you can, take my tongue
that turned yellow with arsenic in the fall
and was torn down like the flag of an ancient catastrophe
by the denuding expletives of the wind.
I'm tired of the ashes and the cemetery wine
that pollutes them; I'm weary of the view,
this worm-eaten map to nowhere
and the lies it must live to fulfill.
I've exhausted the patience
of the bookish rain,
waiting for my shoes to stop talking
about journeys they'll never take,
so that I can tell them I was a man
with a tarnished direction
that led me off the known roads
to taste the wild blackberries
that ripened in brambles of razorwire.
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poem by Patrick White
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I Want To Make A Contribution
I want to make a contribution.
I want to leave something on the stairs of the temple
in the dead of the night and steal away like a shadow,
hoping my small gift of a gift is well-received.
That the stars don't think they're wasting their light
to shine down upon it. Nor the wind resent the seeds it carries.
Fifty years of poetry. Painting the picture-music
the darkness pours into my heart and my heart conveys to my ears.
I can taste thousands of wildflowers like eyes in my blood.
I can taste the homelessness of the rogue stars in my tears,
and pull the wounded swords I cull like thorns of the rose
from the stone of my brain that fell in the farmer's field
like a rock through the window of the abyss
and make it clear as Merlin locked in his tower of glass,
that the stars only look fixed from a distance,
up close and intimate as atoms they're in a frenzy of creation
like a cloud of gnats in the last rapture of the sunset
radioactive with the bliss of being alive to know this.
That we're all longing for home in the lap of an expansive awareness
that threw the starmaps away the moment we were born
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poem by Patrick White
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