DARKER AND DARKER

DARKER AND DARKER

 

Darker and darker

all over the planet the ignorance grows

and the violence becomes more intimately catastrophic

and the savagery of minute events

more psychoBabylonic and intense.

Order demands an absolute certainty

that chaos knows doesn’t exist

except as a way for the rich

to keep things heaped up as they are

by revering power and greed

like the black queen

in the dark inner sanctum

of the corporately organized ant-hill

reeking of formic acid like stinging nettles.

A Dajal

the one-eyed red-haired electric apocalyptic liar

walks the earth like a religious fanatic

preaching absolutes that are worth

everyone else dying for

to blood the prophecy.

Apartheid.

Genocide.

Geocide.

The pursuit of happiness

is outpaced by hatred

as a manifest destiny

and the one is the fool of the other.

What does this mean in human terms?

There’s no crime or atrocity we’ve committed

no sin of omission

no heart-numbing disgrace

we’ve turned our backs on and kept silent about

that hasn’t been mastered

and excelled by our children

as their way of protesting

the approval they’re seeking

from our corrupt blood-soaked example.

All governments are serial killers.

And it’s an insult to rabid dogs

to compare them to the psychotics

who efface God

by throwing acid in the eyes of a schoolgirl

learning how to read

or endless versions of the good life

in a multiverse

of omnidimensional commercials

that have amassed themselves

into a new state of being

like waking and sleeping and dreaming.

We’re a Cambrian explosion of logos and memes.

The predators evolve live streaming eyes in HD

and the prey

are squeezed into their carapaces and exo-skeletons

like early crustaceans.

We’re the first fish

to show up with an optic fiber

for a spinal cord

and a deathwish

that will eventually lead to mammals again

like the jinxed genes of a mutant species

or a bottom feeder with a big brain

piled up like fossilized faeces

looking for its origins

in what it ate yesterday.

The Sufis say

you begin to take on the characteristics

of anyone you’ve been around

longer than forty days

and the stars and the flowers

are beginning to look more and more

like razor-blades and barbed wire

and the mirrors are beginning

to crack my face

like a fortune-cookie

for what they see in it

and deeply resent becoming.

But it’s just as hard to pull pure fish

out of polluted water

as it is to squeeze light out of starmud

to clarify the matter.

And there’s less and less to work with

that does much good

when you’re among too many angels

like lean ideals

who don’t eat food

or know what it feels like

to suffer your own inhumanity

as well as that of that of others

like an infection

that eludes detection

by longing for perfection

from the imperfect

like shadows

going in the wrong direction

on a starless night

looking for enlightenment well beyond

what is right

what is wrong

what hurts so much

when you see the world as it is

you’re walking through a field of nettles

without skin

or if you prefer to see it as it isn’t

you’re a butterfly in the dragon’s mouth

a snowflake on a furnace

the diamond skull of a liberated Buddha

in the lost and found

of a spiritual abyss

that thought you were a bad idea

in the first place.

Every day is the dark dawn

of a new eclipse

that leechs the light from our blood.

And every night retrieves its dead

and carries them off into the darkness

like indelible proof the lives we’ve led

weren’t worth the blood and dirt

they’re written in

like lies we told the earth

like excuses we made for ourselves

as the light draws straws

to see who gets the short end

of trying to brighten things up

by cutting our hearts out

like savage roses

in this abbatoir of blood

that runs like a river out of Eden.

What’s history

if it isn’t a madman on a binge with a knife

as if every day

were the worst day

of a long and insatiable life?

Among the great expansive themes of life

we put our hands over the mouths

of screaming children

and teach them to live between the lines

following the star they’re all born under

that will lead them like wise men

bearing gifts

all the way down to the footnotes

that look up for a sign

they’re on the right path

and see the heavens filled with asterisks

like the burnt-out constellations of the mind

the blind consult like starmaps

to lead the blind

deeper into the darkness

like eyeless vines with mindless roots

that never know what fruits might come

of witching for water in hell

like a dead branch

thorned by evolution

to drink blood from its own skull

trying to slake its raging thirst

like a torch it can’t put out

in the bittersweet grails

of cosmic confusion

that taste like human delusion.

We raise our skulls up like empty cups

carved like ancient craters

out of the moon

and drink to the stars

like dead seas that stare back nostalgically

into the old abyss

of their cold impersonal eyes

as if there were nowhere left to live

we could adapt to our lies.

 

PATRICK WHITE