I Remember Loving You

I remember loving you.
You turned my heart into a koan I haven't cracked yet.
You were a muse of dark matter.
A Mayan phase of the moon
that kept your predictions to yourself.
You were the unified field theory
that made me feel I knew why I was here.
That my abysmal ignorance
was the ore
of infinite enlightenments to come
each one a world of its own
we were free to start with each other.
I remember touching your skin
as if I were reaching out to a ghost
to see if it was real.
Even now after all these years
I can recall the sensation
as if I were holding
a first folio edition of Shakespeare
that no one knew anything about.

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poem by Patrick White
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I'm Going To Stare

I'm going to stare the sweet, white oblivion
behind the purity of this page down
until it breaks its vow of silence
like the hymen of a nun
and there are little scarlet letters
of red-blooded apostasy
lying like rose petals all over the snow.
I'm going to track birds all over this page
like the linearity of an unknown Etruscan alphabet
everybody's trying to translate into their native language
like the lozenge of a sacred syllable
that disappears on their mother tongue
like the first spring thaw of the year.
I don't care if the hunters in my rear view mirror
scratch their heads at the strange signs they're tracking,
I'm going to expand their vocabulary
with beasts that have never appeared
on anyone's wall before.
I'm going to teach the Neanderthals
to paint like Hieronymus Bosch.

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poem by Patrick White
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Heroin

You'll never leave me
You need me in this life
You can't live without me
I own you
You belong to me
That's right, don't ever try to leave me
Because you can't
You can't do it
You know who I am
(Who are you? Tell em' your name*)
My name is Heroin I'm better than your medicine
I'll take your life and your soul if you let me in
There ain't a problem in this world that I can't fix
There ain't a pain that you have I can't help you deal with (X 2)
You need me you can't live without me inside you
Don't believe in negative press you've been lied to
I'm all you need in life you can't breathe without me
I'm your best friend, your lover and your family
I make you feel like you have supernatural power
I'm all you need and I'm just a brown powder

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song performed by Q-Strange
Added by Lucian Velea
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Holding It In, The Pain, The Doubt, The Solitude

Holding it in, the pain, the doubt, the solitude.
Caging my wild heart out in the open where the stars live,
and the bars are all on the inside like toppled pillars
still holding up the friezes of a few high ideals as much
out of habit, as to show a lot of class
in the way you fall to your knees like a bull
in a tauromachia of the zodiac with seven sunbeams
like acupuncture needles or porcupine quills in your back,
as your ear is cut off like Van Gogh's and thrown
like a rose of blood to a lady in the crowd.

Living in the lunar half light of all my uncertainties.
Trying to see things I've been dying for most of my life
not as expiring consolations on a terminal night ward,
night lights in the morgue, flowers beside the bed,
soft, white shoes whispering down the polished halls of the dead
so they could get a good night's sleep, knowing
there were more nightmares in their lives
than the hard pillows of the world
they lay their heads down on as if

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poem by Patrick White
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Stupid, Stupid World Full Of Lies

Stupid, stupid world full of lies, self-deceit, greed,
conspiratorial stinging nettles, leeching bills, vampiric,
cutting off the flow of things like tiger-mussels,
hillbilly hippies beating up their girlfriends on crack,
all these egotistic puff ball mushrooms with labial gills
mythically inflated by one night's good rain
into albino planets, people who have more keys to heaven
than they have locks on hell, abandoned school bells
that go on talking to themselves like wandering scholars
light years after the children grew old at their perennial recess
and the moths and the mice and the mildew
keep putting out books epilogues after everyone's
forgotten how to read the signs of their own decay.

Between the horns of the moon that's been thrown
like a goat skull into the wishing well of my heart,
roadie spiders string my harp for me like false eyelashes
in the green room, and the nerves of the mirrors
are shattered into the frayed deltas of the ropes of hope
endangered elephants are trying to climb up to heaven on.

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poem by Patrick White
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Murder Me Again With Your Voice

Murder me again with your voice,
the moon, your maculate heart, the weapon of your choice.
I am space, light, water, air, stars beyond your reach.
Meteor showers have been looking for my species for years
And still I thrive like glass eyes with real tears,
in the shadows of your amorous extinctions.

You can snuff a thousand votive candles out.
You can desecrate the shrine where I bury my feelings
like the small bodies of gentle birds
beside the ashes of the dragons that burnt out
like solar flares returning to the source.
You stab at the wind. You can try to ruin the sun
with a pettiness that isn't worthy of the moon
that sends no night bird out to look for you
though my longing says you've been missing for years.

Nothing against you, nothing especially for,
though I thought I saw for a moment Bailey's Beads
peeking through the lunar valleys of your last eclipse.

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poem by Patrick White
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A tale of our times.

(The life of Howard R Hughes is phenomenal. He was born in Houston, US on 24/12/1905 and expired on 05/04/1976. He owned a number of companies and was the Chairman of Hughes Aircrafts. But his richness did not give him a peaceful life towards the end. Life is afterall not a question of material richness but a measure of richness of mind and heart. His life naturally compels everybody to reflect on the moral and spiritual values of life. Hence this poem has a purpose unto mankind. I haven't tried to shorten this long, narrative poem for the fact that the reader should get to the whole issue of how a man could dig his own foundations to ruin himself. Let us take a lession out of his life) .

On board an air ambulance,
On way to The Methodist Hospital,
Unknown and unsung
He breathed his last.

His billions were a waste,
Richness could not save his life.
From the springs of yore
It was a wreckless wander unto a recluse and beyond.

Once upon a time
The winds were blowing soft.
Long long ago
His seasons were normal and perfect.

During his prime life
He was an archetype.

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poem by Ravi Panamanna
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Better To Flash A Sharp Knife Quickly

Better to flash a sharp knife quickly across someone's throat
as the last remaining mercy
than bludgeon them to death retroactively as you do.
The first is just another big city workaday murder on the nightshift
but the way your offended sense of righteous indignation
has turned to hate
as you sit there sliding needles into your arm
like loveletters into a bruised envelope
you've addressed in blood to yourself
I can tell you're sticking pins into the eyes
of black madonna voodoo dolls
deep inside a secret hiding place in your childhood
where you indoctrinate them into genocide.
You're a beautiful woman with lots to hide
and I don't want to know where the corpses are
as if the only intimacies worth caring about
were all long buried in this desert of stars.
And twice before I've tasted the blood of the black widow
and yes it may be sweetened
by all the butterflies it's eaten

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poem by Patrick White
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The Flowers Of The Street People

White trash with their faces punched in like catcher's mitts
mooning the flowers of the street people as they drive by
like a float in a pageant of ignorance having a good time
at everyone else's expense. Pygmy heroes of their own irrelevance.

Annie, the bag-lady, puts the avalanche of her head down
and spits like salt as if she just survived Sodom and Gomorrah
as she passes by, sullen and resigned to the blackflies
that have swarmed her like the shadows of commas for years.
You just have to take one look at her face to know
she's the dried rose of a gnostic gospel that went flakey
long before women were forbidden from invigilating
their own spirits. Given the protocols of the bleakness,
even the city can serve as a shrine of sorts. Man bulls
in lunar labyrinths, and the Princess of Spiders,
unweaving her thread in a moment of desire
waiting to have her webs elevated among the stars
in cosmic reprisal for the betrayal of her abandonment to love.

And there's Peter, the architect turned shipwreck,

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poem by Patrick White
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You Keep Looking

You keep looking for meaning in a world
you say hasn't given you one
worth living for
and you're down and disappointed
and all that red passion
that used to burn like books and leaves
has turned as mystically brown
as the background of a Rembrandt painting
or gone up in smoke
at the Bonfire of the Vanities.
Now you're a copycat Savanarola
in a faculty lounge
trying to turn God back like the Renaissance
for behaving like the Medici.
You used to be a little on the teachy side
but now you're boring and preachy
having settled the whole issue
of what you're doing on earth like a fist.
You once went looking for the point of life like a grail.
Now you plunge it through everyone's heart like a spear.

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poem by Patrick White
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I Miss You

I miss you like a burn victim misses his face, misses the sky he used to wear like skin. I think I'm dying tonight; Friday night, wandering from unfinished room to unfinished room, trying on coffins, looking at death in the shedding mirrors, wondering what my life has amounted to, a raindropp in the desert, trying to green the hourglass time raises to its lips, twin goblets, drunk on sand. I want to bleed like a bell for the unfathomable reservoirs of human pain that have yet to be endured as the original tears of life, the rocks weeping, and even the mountain eventually burying its proud face in the hands of its valley. I have heard the stars weeping, and been crippled by compassion for the wounded rose of blood, all the petals and eyelids and tongues that have tasted themselves on the thorn. If I have ever been a lantern on the road, a star you could follow home like a river, a tree that stood over you for the night, a shadow that summoned you into the light, black honey buffed with the flowers of revised constellations taking their seats in the revolutionary parliaments of the night, now I'm a kind of indecipherable braille hanging like black holes and severed chandeliers of pleading cherries beseeching wicks and filaments from astringent space. Look at what life has done to me; look at what happened to the candle. O just once more to yearn like the moon for a beginning, for an eyeless passion that hasn't seen itself out to the end like a ladder of worn thresholds ribbed like a man. I have drunk from the fountains of great teachers, great spirits, enormous suggestions of the soul that have emptied me like the echo of the world into a vastness as impersonal as the first word of creation and I have tried to be brave enough to see deeply into the night in my voice, the clarities and luminosities that have their seasons in the high fields, the wells that lament the aging of the morning brides torn like tents, the cocoons of the light abandoned like the exhalation of a last breath, I have tried to add my understanding like a planet that could thrive like a torch in a mansion of secret wines. I have tried to say whatever I was becoming without wringing the moonlight out of the tide. I have not lied about the poppies in their dream gowns of evanescent fire; or transgressed the humble shrines of the grass, or forgotten the progress of the girl robed in swans and willows in the eyes of the crone. And I have been withered too much by suffering to be flattered by the tendril of my name growing like smoke on the lips of the seeds. I assumed my throne like a pauper where the fire burned the clearest, and established the realm of my seeing in the crumb of a dream I rubbed from my eyes whenever I awoke to the illimitable domains of my nothingness. And I have counted the prophetic skulls of the demon moons as if they were a forbidden rosary that pearled the darkness, and been amazed at my affinity for the hopelessness of their vilified freedom. I sleep with an eyelash like a sword between myself and evil, one fuse unlit, one world that hasn't gone off like a rocket at Halloween. But when I consider true goodness in others, cooling like sweet bread on the summer starsills of their openness, I am always left feeling dangerously intelligent by contrast, and lacking, as if all modes of virtue were the happy sluglines of compromised yesterdays I use to start fires in an iron heart on a winter morning. Though I be condemned to the subtleties of the most intimate torments, incommunicable agonies of erosive condemnation, there is still a lie I won't tell myself to be worthy of heaven, because I will not dust the earth with my wings, I will not corrupt the integrity of the suffering of my humanity with any paradise that isn't born of its substance. I will not fail the rag of my poor flesh even on the eve of defeat, the tattered sail of blood that turns this boat of bones into the wind to come round again in a salvo of ferocious defiance. A gesture of the air, no doubt; a lethal folly, but the plank of my nature. So keep your angels away from me until I am a peer of the struggle, until I have won a parity from intensities I could never defeat. Until my humanity is an indelible word in the mouth of God, an ink, a wine, a thread of blood, that stains the lips of God with the inexplicable mystery of my contradictory existence. So much undergone, so much of becoming and transcendence embodied and dissolved in the shapes of shadow, blood and water, and love through it all, tears and laughter, the mingling of illumination and eclipse, one firefly of the spirit thawing glaciers and fierce eras of brutal evolution, one thought snuffing the stars like an eyelid. I love the heresy of vaulting the horns of the moon, the first and last crescents of the dilemmic parentheses that enclose me like an aside to an actor prompted offstage by the whisper of his own understudy dying ambiguously in the very next scene. What's a flower, what's a life, but a play on tour, directed by the cuts and takes of the wind and the light? Everyone in the audience, alive and wounded, sentenced, is on death row where every star that shines through the bars is the sprinkling syringe of a fatal injection, or the motherlode of the mystically deranged.
I miss you. I could love you so perfectly; even the errors in harmony. I could be the pillar of a temple of water; I could be sufficient for your sake, a curtain of shadows on the moon to cool the hot swan of the light that sails through a window wide as space. I could be something more in your presence, something I've never been before; the whole cosmos out to the most estranged star, hanging like a dropp of water from a heron's beak, a witching-wand that trembles with watersheds everytime it divines you. I think of gently taking the moon in my teeth, of kissing you on the neck behind your ear, of the season in your hair, the supple concession of your lips, undoing the star yokes on the beast that draws the wagon of this corpse to wander off road in the bestial freedom of its ecstatic vagrancy. I could know you like a fish knows the moon, underwater, could swim to you from here, or rise to your hooks as if they were stars, and swallow, or be a dragon heaving off its lake like a robe of water with wildflowers and the open eyes of the rain shaken from the folds of the eclipses and eras of its wings. You could empower me to risk an excruciating excellence of devotion; an eloquence and exquisitivity of perception that would compel my eye to turn the light around and look inwards like a black hole for the firefly in the casket of its telescope. However far I walked through a desert of lunar salt, excoriated by ferocious purities like a bone with the wind for marrow, no two footprints of mine would ever be the same, nor would the moon, so much like the heart, ever drink its own commingling of light and shadow from the same cup twice. I think of the things that could be; the air saturated with light trying to fall like rain; the blood efflorescent with poppies, with gypsy profligates, outraging the startled goodness of the wheat by dancing lasciviously with fire. Out of the air, out of space, out of time, living on nothing, I can almost make you happen before me like an event so intensely imagined the curtain had to open on a troupe of improv stars on tour among the constellations. The abyss of an eyelash away, I can almost touch you, taste you, feel you reach out for me like a bay of space, hear you call my name like a homing bird sliding like love-letter under the doorsill of the wind. Grief can call people like that, but it is love that is the gate-mouth of my answering, it is love that conjures you out of this galactic cauldron where I cannot pull this sword of light from the stone of my heart like a letter without bleeding like a crimson sea of candlewax to verify the seal of your enthronement in the kiss of every impression. The truth is too brief, and the lies are too long to be the suitable luggage of love. I'd need something like a seed, a cocoon, an eye, a lantern, a star to travel radiantly through this darkness as fragile as a kite held aloft by a feather of fire, my spinal cord in your hands, or strung across the musical snakepit of a lifeboat guitar like a powerline, or a clown riding the bicycle of his glasses. The seas once gone from the moon, love alone can keep the whisper of water alive.
I saw the full moon in the window through black winter branches, and I thought of you in sadness and love, and wondered if your eyes fell upon it like rain as mine did.

poem by Patrick White
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