THE REASON MOST PEOPLE ARE UNHAPPY

THE REASON MOST PEOPLE ARE UNHAPPY

 

The reason most people are unhappy

is that they love their misery.

They cling to it

like a voodoo doll of themselves

they’ve been poking pins in since childhood.

They derive their identity from it.

They wouldn’t know who they were without it.

They drive pins through its eyes in the mirror

to make things clear as rain

and then refusing to go along

with the flow of life

seek shelter in the pain

of never going anywhere.

They cast curses

on fate on God on life on love

on the impure selflessness of blue knowledge

but they’re spitting into the wind

and their curses come back on them

like chapter and verse

of an infernal bible

that doesn’t command them

to do anything but carry on as they are.

You can look up astonished at the stars

enraptured by a glimpse of the same mystery

that awes the gods themselves

into an unfamiliar silence

and lose the moment

like a butterfly on a chainsaw

as you hear the hiss and snarl of misery 

dying and whining beside you

like a snowflake on a furnace

about being down to its last cigarette

in front of all these firing squads

gathered like constellations

against the innocent flame

of a solitary match

that refuses to go out

without fixing the blame

on everything else that shines.

Misery sees a waterlily opening in a swamp

transforming all that decay

like enlightenment

into something brief and beautiful

like earth’s answer to the stars

and it’s the swamp it remembers

in all its lurid details:

the spider sucking the life

out of the dragonfly

caught in a radiant web

among the treacherous cattails.

Misery holds a grudge against life

for sustaining itself on food

it grows for itself

and breaks like loaves among the poor

to keep things going

whether you taste honey

or bitter ashes on your bread

or brunch with the dead

by giving up hunger altogether

as a protest against

the lavishness of nature

squandering good water on wine.

I remember a poet

from the non-existent good old days

who could cut your throat like a razor

with a sharp dark phrase

and the birds would stop singing

and his girlfriend in the corner

would shudder to think

she would be his next blood-sacrifice

if he were ever to discover

how innocent she really was.

He ended the way he began

according to his own cosmic laws

with nothing left to eclipse

agreeing with Sophocles

that never to have been born is best.

He may have gotten the world off his chest

when he shot himself through the heart

like the last fang of wisdom he had to impart

like a crescent of the moon

that would never be full

like a sickle without a harvest

that cut down everything in sight

just to spite the flowers

but he had to point the gun

at his heart

not his brain

to do it.

And that was that.

He stayed true to his pointlessness

as if that were the point

he had been trying to make all along.

And then the birds broke back into song.

 

PATRICK WHITE