I DON'T CARE WHAT YOU BELIEVE OR ESPOUSE

I DON’T CARE WHAT YOU BELIEVE OR ESPOUSE

 

I don’t care what you believe or espouse,

show me what you eat

and I’ll know what your ideology is.

Capitalism, for example,

like a great hog at the Wall Street Trough,

the Toronto Stock Exchange,

eats its own young down to the marrow.

And communism descends like a plague of locusts

out to reform the sheaves of the people like wheat.

And the worst world fanaticism,

the Islamofacists and Zionazis,

and the flies who rule Africa,

who promise milk and honey

and houris around the fountain of Salsabil

to anyone who murders in their name,

puts everything on the menu

and makes anyone anywhere fair game.

And it’s free enterprise for the poor

and it’s socialism for the rich

who get the biggest welfare cheques

while the middle extreme between them

lives on the trickle-down economics

of the leftovers that fall off the table

of politicians throwing scraps to the hunting dogs

who move among the legs of their masters

like lobbyists among the pillars of the banks

knee-deep in the blood of the abbatoir

in which they sit down like cattle-prods to give thanks.

Consider the collateral damage

of children killed like footnotes

or amendments to a bill

that would permit the sale of landmines

to the lords of famine who plant them

to shatter the flesh of the farmer who’s learned

to plough with a sword.

Bumper crops of body parts.

And look how the indifferent and the evil

wash their hands of blood

in the bottled water of the highest ideals of the mob

mouthing off to the pundits of popcorn

to secure a place on the Great Cob

of the American nightmare.

And it’s good to have a big heart with a big dream

that knows enough CPR

to thump on your chest to revive you

but how long can it survive in a world

that’s got a sewer for a bloodstream?

And what can you make of a Republican party

parsing the purity of gangrene

to block health care reform

like an election with a saw in its hands?

And you may think you know Christ

and organize like the Templars of C-Street

with great crosses of blood on your adulterated bedsheets

to protect the holy land from Democrats

but you better look twice in the mirror

at the skidmark you are in his eyes

when you stand up like the atrocity you are

to toast the good life with a grail

expecting to be rewarded

for all the sick children you denied a cure

by a healer who loved them beyond death.

Did you know there are state suppers in hell

where demons drink the blood of children

from a church bell

and draw lots from your skull

to see who gets to eat your heart today?

And spit it out like a fly

that corrupts the choicest wines

of the infernal and divine alike?

Even in hell as you are on earth

you’re bad meat down the well,

and some have noticed lately

even the fire that cooks you

is tainted by the smell.

Do you really think the sublime intelligence

that suffuses creation with love

like the dark mother of us all

and frees us like rivers of insight

to return to her like bright waters full of life

would affirm your offense to existence for long;

or that Jesus, Muhammad, Moses, Buddha,

or the decency who lives down the street,

knowing the children, the uncles, the brothers,

the lovers, the fathers and mothers,

the friends who have died

because there was a cure

a remedy, a redemption

for what killed them

but you denied them,

would condone

the electoral greed and cunning

of a petty slumgod in the senate

as an excuse for so much pain?

Or that the croaking of toxic toads

on corporate lily pads

rooted in the muck and swamp gas

of your obnoxious morality

that scabs the snapping turtles

waiting like backroom ceo’s below

would pass through their ears

like the clefs of angelic choirs

swanning their way through murder on Moonlake?

Or that the way you turn the prayers of mothers

all over the earth tonight

that their wounded children might live,

that they might walk and see and hear again,

that there be an end of the suffering and the illness,

that they have shelter and food,

school, play, medicine

and time to explore their innocence,

the way you pervert their prayers

into the new rhetoric of liars

crushing compassion

under the jackboots

of your fanatically uncommon sense,

as if you spoke from one bush

for many fires,

or looked at Christ’s wound

as he hung on the cross before your committee

as you choked the neck of the microphone and said,

Physician heal thyself.

There are no fiscal limits on your pity.

Or funding for universal coverage to resurrect the dead.

 

PATRICK WHITE