Patrick White Poems

Blue hole in a swarm of afflicted emotion,
I cannibalize my own event horizons,
to turn off the glare of the lifelight
that boils my brain in delusional bleaches
...

My lonely island music,
already I see in your eyes, devastation in the dead zone,
skulls littering the field, autumns wandering away
weeping like windows that mistook themselves for the sky
...

When the blue dove turns back,
exhausted by looking for things
she hoped to find,
blue blood to the dark side of the heart,
...

Never alone with a candle
a firefly in a valley,
a star above the hill,
is your seeing less beautiful
...

Manically slashing paint late at night
on a white canvas.
Blood on the snow.
Chewing my limbs off to get out of a leg-hold trap.
...

I’m on some kind of journey
but I don’t know where it’s going;
I’m growing wings and shedding them,
and I’m true to every thought in my head.
...

You, my house of burning thresholds, come
to me written on the breath of urgent windows,
and the palms of the walls that want their fortunes read, come
with palettes and kittens and your blue notebook of poems
...

Small, warm birds of feeling,
a profound tenderness,
something to cherish
in the loneliness of being human
...

The season wears out like an old pair of shoes
too far gone to reheel the sunlight
and the road is rough with the gravel of time,
and it’s doubtful the gates I’ve walked through
...

Awake and labouring for light in this dayshift of dreams
as the platitudinous dawn takes her make-up off,
her eyelashes the hands of amputated clocks
that once prayed over the ruptured acids
...