IS IT SO HARD

IS IT SO HARD

 

Is it so hard to imagine a world

where we’ve all stopped dying at our own hands

where we return to the more human illusion

of having personalities instead of brands?

Where the living cells of our flesh

are not virtually mineralized

by the logos and memes

of the new periodic table

of mutant elements

that have deranged

the molecular structures

that once stood behind our names.

There are cuckoos

there are xenophobic changelings

in everybody’s nuclear nest

smashing eggs at the roots of the tree

they were born to sing in

like a mass infanticide of whole notes.

Our first mother’s womb

was a generous open place

that gave freely of itself. 

Now we conspire to steal our way in

like something in our food

to tamper with the face we’ve always wanted

like an airbrushed photo on the cover of a magazine,

still-lives of sexy semi-nudes

posing like menus with attitude.

We’re all jawing the stale gum of our lives

like the psychotic cud serial killers chew

when they’ve slaughtered all their sacred cows.

Nanochips have deposed our mitochondria.

God’s eye is flyed with pixels

and everyone is looking

for signs of the end

in every blue beginning

like a corpse that can’t wait.

And the muses of our heartless arts

conspire with us like

hatred of the bad

hatred of the good

perversion of the root

coercion of the flower

as we sign our names like skidmarks

to the new designer dreams

that can see eternity in a sound-bite

and in the workings of the universe

the most successful snakepit

of all our corporate schemes.

TV turned the stone over

and now we can look into things

we’ve never seen before

like birds in the eyes of a cobra

paralyzed by the mesmeric horror

of watching what happens to the others

day after day after day

as if our destinies

were merely a hypocritical kind of luck

as if our eyes were embedded like jewels

in the keyhole of a door

we’re all looking through on the inside

to see what they meant

when they called the world Babylon

and Babylon a whore.

All those candles in the night

we kept burning

like gestures of faith

in someone returning

have suffered a major meltdown

and now we’re Peeping Toms

in the windows of existence,

billions of tiny Tom Thumbs

sticking our opposable thumbs

in everyone else’s pies

to gouge out the plums

of their incredible Oedipal eyes.

We’ve reversed the spin

on the polarity of our stars,

we’ve navigated away from the old skies

with all their analogue cliches of shining

like web-sites digitally streaming

the last live reality show on Mars 

to expose its scars as ours

soon enough.

We’ve reversed the spin

on the polarity of our eyes

and now we’re looking out of the darkness

into everybody else’s lies

like the original sins

of our own myths of origin

that have always tried to finish us

right where we begin

knowing we’ll fall for it all over again

like a sure cure for obesity impotence and pain:

elixirs of pharmaceutical snakeoil

injected directly into the brain

like messianic chemicals

that can raise the dead from the living

like a gift that just doesn’t know when

to stop giving.

Is it so hard to imagine a world

given what you know of this one

where the dead don’t legislate for the living

and any sign of life in the cemetery,

any fragrance any colour any taste

any action any twitch of life

that trips the switch of your boney fingertips

and turns something on

that isn’t already too far gone to call back

isn’t an event on the flatlining horizon of a blackhole

to the other side of a brighter world

as abhorrent as dawn is to a ghost?

Is it so hard to imagine a world

that isn’t one of Mother Hubbard’s old shoes

crammed with too many children

chewing on leather to live,

a world without human traffickers off its coast

coyotes at its border

overturning lifeboats of refugees

or taking off their shoes

to dump the pebbles of the road out of them

like the skulls of desperate, helpless people

who couldn’t swim through sand or water

to save their own lives for love or money.

Standing in one of the four gates

into the mystically-walled garden

of an unenlightened North America

down to its last green leaf

looking out over the thresholds

of its paranoid coasts

is it so hard to imagine a world

where people don’t treat people

like climacteric plagues of swarming locusts

all looking for a green card to nibble on

like spring leaves on the tree of life in the dead of winter?

 

PATRICK WHITE