Patrick White Poems

ations.

At war with the world and yourself
like two halves of the same unbroken wishbone,
...

You were the intimacy
of the things I loved
that were so impossibly far away
I could never reach out and touch them
...

You are crazy and beautiful
and wounded and wild
and the youngest daughter
of a coven of poetic sea-witches,
...

A day of writing, trying to clarify myself
to Alysia, myself, Alysia, to the night rain,
trying to hang the universe on the tip of an eyelash
without blinking, pulling handfuls of the stagnant dimensions
...

Yes, there are pale gardens, wings ribbed
like the eyelashes of butterflies, and roses
of flaking blood rooted like something
that was said between the lines of lovers
...

My death was a quiet event.
I entered the abyss with all
the constituents of the first sign of life
to give voice to the silence
...

I don’t know what I’m here for.
I just write. I just paint. Like breathing
in and out. Inspired expiration. I watch the rain,
blankly, sometimes for hours, washing off the dust
...

Counting Orphic skulls on the abacus of a spider web.
Listening to them click like pool balls, crabs and castanets.
I'm beading new solar systems out of the nebular air. I'm seeding
clouds of unknowing with genetically unmodified meteors.
...

Mad people trying to impress me with the quality of their souls.
Ego-slurry alienated radioactively from the rest of the world
trying to compensate for the meltdown of their lives
by glowing bioluminescently in the dark like the tiny zodiacs
...

Everybody says I'm too intense and I say
you sure as hell aren't.
And since I was sixteen in highschool
and before that in the local neighbourhood
...