Patrick White Poems

I can feel my physical energies tweaking the words
like birds and dragons waking up, my voice
a hive of dopey bees, my eyes, a hangover of stars.
My heart is syncopating its keyboard
...

What I have become and did not intend.
Is there no end of that deathmask in the mirror?
Glum when I should be shining, bright
when it hurts my eyes. O what little blueprints
...

What I have become and did not intend.
Is there no end of that deathmask in the mirror?
Glum when I should be shining, bright
when it hurts my eyes. O what little blueprints
...

A grey music hovers over the town.
No people on the streets. Background drone
of furnaces working overtime against the cold.
Space and time on the nightshift and fossils
...

A grey music hovers over the town.
No people on the streets. Background drone
of furnaces working overtime against the cold.
Space and time on the nightshift and fossils
...

Bright blue winter Sunday in a slow town.
Eclipsed by the vivid contrast of light and dark,
watching the carcasse of a sabre-tooth in a tarpit,
cellphone by cellphone, being replaced, no app for it,
...

Watching mirrors on a catwalk
but none of them interest me.
Disembodied as a play without a stage
it takes time to know where to stand.
...

If it's a true religion, it hasn't got a history, it's wholly
of the moment. No time for a teacher.
No martyrs, saints, apostates or heretics.
No Summa Theologica trying to proof-read the spirit.
...

Set up for the night, the candle in its niche,
Jupiter a long way from the moon by now,
cat and goldfish fed, my mind never is
but my heart seems to be in the right place,
...

Trying to get centered in the middle of chaos
isn't going to turn me into the third of eye
of a hurricane rose, or square the circle
with the clarity of a lens with a seeing-eye dog.
...