WHY DOES LIFE?

Why does life make me so sad?

Why can’t I adjust to the lies

that genomically engender

the neuronic fires

of the rabid bloodlust that rules

this slum of thieves

called the world?

We are condemned by our own principles,

the pointing finger

is an accusation

that will soon enough

emerge from its chrysalis of ignorance,

a gun. Even as a man

who has ardently endeavoured

to love humanity

and squanders himself even still

in pursuing this chronic folly,

for whom compassion

is the eloquence of the spirit

when it weeps for something it loves

that suffers

and it raises itself up like a well

and pours itself like the serene sea of a mother

into the ear of a troubled child,

how can my heart not be appalled

by the irrelevance of love and truth and beauty

in the rapacious affairs of the world?

Tragedy is a euphemistic gloss in a human abbatoir

compared to the debacle

of greed and blood it is.

Trying to say it

will make you ill, emotionally bilious,

will cook your heart

in its radioactive toxicity

if you linger too long

over the prophetic cauldrons of these realms.

We have expanded the horizons of horror

and bound stairwells to the tree of life

like a fungus,

like the scales of a vicious snake.

Everybody wants the forbidden,

everybody wants to live like a broken taboo,

everybody leads the life

of a bacterium in a germ culture,

no one wants to be

swept up like a fish in a net of regrettable statistics.

Bread and circuses, the wealthy few

assuage the mob with symbolic pieties

and hysterical aspirations

fanned and feathered by credit cards,

as the banks

turn the temple into a casino

and the moneychangers

overturn the tables of the Last Supper.

The rich raven on the poor

and the poor prey on the poor

and the poor are recruited

to kill the poor

to defend the table manners

of a rich man’s way of eating.

Agony, grief, murder, rape, torture, corruption,

have the stars long since sickened

at what they stare down upon

or is their light as unfeeling as our eyes?

Are there not more bullet holes

in our own

than there are fangs

on all the snakes in the world?

And I am not deluded

this poem makes any significant difference

no more than a piece of straw

in a forest-fire;

I could not feed it to a starving child,

it would not bring her mother

back to life.

It may well be

that the pen is mightier than the sword,

but that just makes it

a war higher in rank

like a bomber

punctuating the unseen population below

in their own blood.

Lament how I will,

in the mouths of those who foul them,

the word’s a lamprey that follows the shark

and a lie wants me to say except for mine

but I would lose the advantage

of the deeper lie

if I didn’t admit it.

Anonymity our ultimate asylum,

flaring matcheads, not stars

we anoint people to be known for us

as we would garland a calf for slaughter

to sweeten the meat

we serve to our petty gods

that they might endlessly remand

our haste to be worthy of their judgment.

PATRICK WHITE