More Past In My Brain As I Get Older Than Future Poem by Patrick White

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Patrick White

Patrick White

Campbell River, British Columbia, Canada

More Past In My Brain As I Get Older Than Future



More past in my brain as I get older than future,
intrusive memories like ghosts come seeking absolution
I still can't give them sincerely after all these years
of irrelevant tears evaporating through holes in the ozone.
Things I'd wholly forgotten about, returning to this seance
convened by the mother of the muses in her crone phase
like stars and flowers come back to make you smile again
for something as simple as remembering their names
you thought you'd lost in the grass like rings on a key chain.
Painful images I wish I'd never lived to see
but came to understand slept just under the eyelids
of the things most people dream of damaging
by inflicting the worst wounds on their own savage humanity.
Lovers that reoccur in the night air like fireflies
recalling some moment when we touched illicitly
double-crossing all of our mutual taboos to risk
the burning bridge of the dangerous blessing
of the passionate dragon on the far shore of our urgent flesh.
The riverine sediments of the mindstream's starmud,
an encyclopedic compendium of outcomes and random eventualities.

Any single one of these mystic details is the table of contents
of a whole other life than the one I've been living so far,
stars matted in the hair of the leafless willows mad with despair.
Joy, pleasure, tenderness. Sorrow, anger, recrimination.
With the planet tilted a feather's weight more toward joy
on its axis, or we wouldn't have anything to cry about
when the season passes. When the wild irises
burn out like pilot lights in the urn of the furnace of the phoenix
losing its will to rise again out of its own ashes.
And through it all, so many afterlives arrested by the mystery
of what we were to each other now that kept
calling us back to each other like wolves in the fog
on opposite hills of the heartscape we couldn't find a way out of.
There's still generosity in my fingertips
when I touch the eyelids, the lips, the lunar thorns,
the feldspar pictographs that have been carved into me
like the braille cartouches of the dynastic royal houses and scars of love.

I like to err on the side of a generous spirit as if
there's always a factor that stands outside the equation
like a fulcrum maintaining a balance that has nothing to do
with equality, but deeply affects the course of a parallel universe.
And I can see through the eyes of the chorus of a hundred voices
chanting like a mantra for me to look at it one
of a thousand other ways to say yes what happened between us
was meant to be, and hear all these fanatical pamphleteers
trying to exonerate the culpability of what we had to do
to survive one another like two separate shoes going their own way.

As sorry as things often turned out, I celebrate the intent
because that part was honest, of who we really wanted to be
to each other, and hoped we were, before the labour
grew too intense, and we took off the pretence of our life masks
and stared into each other's faces like black mirrors in full eclipse.
And I don't need a philosophy to back me up on this.
It's just the way I prefer it. An artistic flourish of the soul, perhaps.
Blue chicory by the side of the road instead of poison ivy.
Strewing more rose petals on the starmap of the path
we walked together for awhile than thorns.
Trying in everything to ennoble the way
I'd like to see myself when I'm on my death bed,
not as some mean-hearted ghoul living under a bridge
but a man who lavished himself like poetry upon life
as if he were sowing stars into the abyss of the wound
love opened up in him like the chasm and chrysalis of a loveletter
always addressed to someone on the other side
of this surrealistically romantic starfish of a universe
where we first met in a ghost dance of enchanted binaries.

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Patrick White

Patrick White

Campbell River, British Columbia, Canada
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