Wednesday, March 25, 2009

WHAT A SAD, VIOLENT LITTLE SHIT

WHAT A SAD, VIOLENT LITTLE SHIT


What a sad, violent little shit you’ve become

now that your crackin.

You talk like Michaelangelo in a quarry

selecting Carrara marble

for the translucency of its alluvial veins,

and you talk about painting with feeling,

but it’s hard to get anything done

when you’re just another Tom Thumb

crushed under a tiny avalanche of rocks

so all you ever really do

is prime the ceiling white

over and over again like a sail

when there’s not much of a wind.

I watch you trying to think,

ferocious with thought,

and it’s like watching a ball

jumping around

trying to pick up its own jacks

like the stars of the razorwire constellations

that dance like a hareem of mean angels

on the head of your pin.

Only a real prick

can scare the needle,

and little brother,

you’re not even that

under all your washaway tats

as you run like a watercolour

in the acid rain of that battery brain

you’re wired to.

Once you were full of doubt and indirection,

you didn’t know who you were

and there were tears

for other people’s sorrows

that wept like candles in elegant chandliers

and a tolerance for the folly of others

that excused your own

that made you seem

at the unlikeliest of times

compassionate and wise.

You were vulnerable.

You could be hurt,

betrayed, rejected,

and I saw in your eyes

that you had no answer for anything

when she left you like a lighthouse

without any warning.

But at least you had the courage of the morning

to get up again and zombie your way

through the rest of the day

as if Lazarus wasn’t a lie.

Now you’re all severities

of radical rock

like a mad dog

biting at its own heart

as if it were an ulcer.

And every second acephalic thought

falls like a head into the breadbasket

at the foot of the guillotine

that makes everyone edgy

about what you truly mean

when you introduce your girlfriend

like a pampered queen,

a trophy butterfly

in the plagiarized web

of an award-winning spider.

You love her like a miner

at a cocktail party

with an ice-pick,

but later when she thaws

she will stab you in the bath like Marat.

Love for you isn’t about

joy or pleasure or children,

not the hive, nor the honey.

It’s the engine

of a fanatical rampage

that fires you up

like a killer bee

to swarm any form of life

that isn’t you in the shopping mall

like a bad tatoo

that can’t make an indelible impression

on anyone

trying to have a gang life

that doesn’t bang around like you

when you sport your true colours like your girlfriend,

tricked out in black and blue

and patched with bruises

where she shoots what she uses of you

like the last crumb in the eye of a dream

you cooked in a spoon without eyelids.

Little brother, don’t come back.

Don’t sit at my table, don’t

greet me when I pass.

You’re just another scream

on fastforward, you’re

just another improvised explosive device, an i.e.d.

buried in the road you’re on

like a heart attack

waiting to happen

like Iraq to an amputee.

If once it was hard

to take the measure

of what you could have been,

like a new energy policy

that insisted on being clean,

now you’re as easy to understand

as Chernobyl or an oilslick.

You’re a spiritual polluter,

a dirty needle, just

another chrome-plated dipstick

in a motor-mouth

that runs on mystic gangrene.


PATRICK WHITE