NO FLOWERS BLOOM

No flowers bloom in the lazy light of a mind that isn’t capable of thinking beyond itself. And there’s no point in trying to send your shadows on ahead into the openness before you, as if a proxy could do your growing for you. Would you hire an eclipse as your gardener? Make the star wait on its understudy? There’s an underground perversity in the world that wants to liberate the executioners from human bondage, that wants to turn their blood green, their eyes into the vampiric abstract glass of an ideology that would lead us through the valleys of life like a shepherd of ghosts. How do you pollinate a microchip? Presented with an infinite choice of variety that is proliferating us, have you noticed the diminishing variety of choice that is simultaneously emaciating the spirit that plays like a child with links of its own? Why do you want to apply yourself like a mental conditioner to the Afro of evolution, the burning bush you’re counting on to turn the dead stick of that wooden dick in your hand into a cannibalistic serpent that can satiate its snake-envy on the magic of lesser magicians? Erectile dysfunction. And your balls the tinkling of two burnt-out lightbulbs in the spotty marquee of a magic fingers motel. Nothing but vacancies. Imperial mirages. Pre-emptive crusades. Worthless, paranoid values pimping the truth up to manipulate the lies of hysterical johns mobbing the red light emergency exit doors like a summons of chemicals to see the latest pole-dancer insinuate herself like the field of an electromagnetic delusion around the earth’s axis, which, of course is that broken wand between your legs. And the cure? The most compassionate act of a feeling person in this century of razor-wire certainties that vine the black wine they press from the windfalls of their human fruit? To be intensely illuminated by the clarity of your ignorance. How else can we stop tearing the faces of children out of the book of life like the expurgated pages of a global policy to give the invisible features of our bloodless abstractions a transplanted identity that might recognize us in our madness?

PATRICK WHITE