Patrick White Poems

Paranoia kills like a fanatic what it suspects without conviction
isn’t true about what it believes about thinking. It’s getting
mad out here, the moon’s gone rabid and the tides are awry.
Given my age and the quality of my rage tempered
...

Looking for an orbit in the ripples of rain at midnight
like a rogue planet that doesn’t belong anywhere.
I enter this page like a tent city in my homelessness
without self-pity, a vagantes wandering in exile
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A paint rag of the masterpiece I used to be.
Is this humility? Or time to quit? I refuse
to listen to my muse as if she were a whistle
on a graveyard shift. A nightbird or nothing
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If I were a poem you'd be the last line that eluded me
like a rope thrown to a man overboard in a perfect storm
of the picture-music that swept me off the deck
as if from then on I wouldn't need legs whenever
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My stomach is a man gingerly walking across quicksand.
If they're not looking at the sky, my eyes
do more looking on the inside than they do
the phenomenal world I've brought in doors
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In the ceaseless silence, is it my soul I address
in these barely audible whispers of blood,
you, are you there, a friend to me, aloof companion,
intimate stranger, are you just the longing of an echo
...

I still believe the pursuit of an earthly excellence,
not in name alone, but in the act of elucidating
even so much as a firefly’s insight into the darkness
to add your experience and confusion to the abyss
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The words make it sound breezy, but experience
chafes our visions of love as if it were sandpapering
our eyes with stars. Graduated grades of carborundum
grinding our parabolic mirrors into subtle refinements
...

I was thinking about absurdity, the unnamed muse
of nine in the fifth place in the Book of Changes
when the daughter of black matter came to my door again
wired and crying as she tried to smile
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If you look upon a puddle of starmud as a degenerate third eye
you’re a retinally detached fascistic mystic that runs
enlightenment into the ground the way Round-Up cowboys weeds.
Your nervous system hasn’t rooted very deeply
...