Monday, December 26, 2011

THE ISSUE


THE ISSUE

I see the sadness in the world, the malevolent madness
of the dogs of pain snarling at the moon in the tree of life,
the way people cut and claw and desecrate each other
and walk away as if there were a victory in the slaughter, a hero in the butchery
that hacks and packs the corpses in the shrieking streets,
the raped daughter, the man on his knees who bleats for mercy
from indifferent gods whose thunderbolts have changed to cattle-prods.
Little, petty people everywhere, runts of the heart and mind,
wee weak ones with the poison syrup of your smiles
distilled from killer bees, you who like to grind your heel into the human face
and celebrate your hydrophobic power as a state of grace,
I ask you here on planet earth, this dirty tear among the stars,
in this horrible hour between birth and death, are you a race
of vicious, midget, spiritual pygmy, or emotional dwarf,
when you were given breath and blood and light,
were you an atrocity of genetic reciprocity, did you wince at the sight
of yourself in the mirror, repulsively wierd and full of fear,
did your mother abandon you on a stone to rot,
give you to a circus, an abortion clinic, a church step, a garbage bag;
are you angry for all the things you know you’re not; do you gag
on the beauty of others, their gifts, their truth
and plot a coup to overthrow anyone who isn’t you, your puny proportions
the prototype of all your replicant distortions
until the earth is filled with ugliness and grief,
and even the strongest are consoled by the fact that life is brief?
What hideous art scars the bitter apple of your heart like a worm
and thorns and norms the form of every thought with malice?
Are you a fly in the chalice, a maggot, a convulsion of dirt;
are you washed clean of yourself by the tears of those you hurt?
Everyday a hundred species disappear, oil and faeces
smeared across the living face that’s mirrored on the waters,
and the moon repelled by the odium of what its light must shine upon.
Lucky the stars that burn so far and furiously away
from this disgrace of molecules and ghouls that only the fools
in schools for the deaf and blind look for reason in the treason,
error in the terror that you wreak. You see birds,
you learn to fly. A century later whole cities die in a flash of light
at the end of your quest for flight. You’re born with a tongue,
you learn to speak, and you say the rich must have what they seek
and the poor will bleed until their hearts are withered by need.
You’re given eyes and clear night skies and a mind behind it all
in a world of revelations, and you learn to see and name,
and by the time you’ve festered into maturity
the vision is grimed by the smog of your vain obscurity,
nacreous cataracts the skies that fog your eyes,
and you’re laying the blame on the picture frame
that holds nothing but the death mask of you, eyes closed,
and yours the signature of the artist for whom you posed,
but nothing of insight, nothing of character disclosed.
Brutal monkey, murderous ape gland, prenatal purge,
is this the world you planned as a gesture of spite,
this jest and riddle of misery on the verge
of serial catastrophe to gratify your calamitous urge
to indict existence for your devolving plight? Here among mystics, lovers, poets,
painters, sinners, saints, singers, astronomers and clowns,
mesmerized by night, or useful as day,
what embodiment of pain justifys the febrile tides of hate
that animate your imagination for decay,
the treachery of the cannibal heart that leeches its own clay?
There must be a hell for you if nothing more
than to meet yourself as you are
behind every opening door, in every house of pain,
in every abattoir, scrying the gore on the bestial floor,
to discover your own features
in the severed eye and lifeless hand of a hundred million creatures.
You’re insane. Every thought, a blister of the brain, a scar too far.
These were your teachers, and everytime you applied your iron rule,
and raving in your dementia, or rationally composed, killed one,
you liberated another buddha from a fool, another sky, another jewel
from the treasury of your own lie,
the one that beats on your heart like a drum
and never lets you forget
that for all the noise you make in the empty silo of creation,
you’re not the harvest, you’re the crumb.

PATRICK WHITE

AND I THINK I MAY BE HALF CRAZY


AND I THINK I MAY BE HALF CRAZY

And I think I may be half crazy, half desperate,
half dead and wholly alone in the dark
with the ghosts of things I could not save
from drowning on the moon, the collapsed bridges
in the accusing eyes of large, wet promises
that died like worms in a hopeful rose,
commas and kisses that ate through its eyelids
into a dream that never grew wings. I am
bent weird like the bruised radiance
of a ray of light chromatically startled
by the return journey of the mirror,
the odd deflections in the pyrex eye
of a telescope that never crys, a white madonna
in a mountain shrine of stars
that stares at the heavens blankly, well beyond
the graphs and passions of her grave ascensions.
And I don’t know where I am,
and I don’t know what to say, and I can’t tell
if it’s always been this way
and I’m just discovering it now
having fallen into some kind of black hole
that we’re all in alone with everyone
believing it’s just another ordinary day,
though it’s never been this day before, so it isn’t;
or if I’ve become the warden
of a private horror locked in himself
like a skeleton in a straitjacket
trying to placate its loss of focus
with the physics of indeterminancy.
Every day I’m at the empty foodbank, every night
the lost and found of licensed lives
that dropped like wallets in the grass,
asking if anyone has seen me lately,
if anyone can recognize my voice.
A million stars return me
like a foundling
to the stairs of my own house
and a dreadful silence walks away
leaving me like a language I don’t know how to speak.
And the hours are eerie and wounded and vast
as if I blundered into the mass grave
of all my former selves and asked the doll
under the arm of an exterminated child
who did this to us. Was it suicide,
Jonestown, black cool-aid,
or the lime of an unknown hatred?
Why am I alone among the missing
in this iron-handed darkness
that makes an oyster of the sky
and grows me like a pearl or the moon
of an uninhabitable planet battered like a bride?
I want to get things off my chest, confess
like a homely cousin of uranium
that I’m really lead at heart, a stable element
that won’t irradiate the dark with refugees
or the brilliant declensions of genius.
I want to be the stuff of aqueducts
and revel in my arches for millenia,
irrefutably benign and useful
from the mountains to the city on the plain;
I do not want to be this farcical Chernobyl
that burns like a brain that melts
before it shines
and kills the birds for centuries around;
I do not want this torment of a half-life.
I do not want this thirteenth house of stars
eager with evictions in the hands
of campaigning landlords
that lie a lot like me. Someone close the door.
Someone lock the window. Someone
tell the ardent stranger at the gate
that he’s come a bell too late
to answer the ad in the local constellations,
I’m down for the night behind a hill
of foreign flags that died like vapid candles,
I’m overseas; I’m off my hinges
and it will be continents yet
before I rise with Mu and Atlantis
to look for a northwest passage
around all the kings in my way.
And I don’t know how it happened
or what precisely has
but a thousand faces aren’t enough
to express me as I am. What net
could catch me on the fly?
And where are the urns
that once enthralled my ashes,
and if I’m now in exile
and this is not a country with a mouth
where are my thresholds now, where
the golden skulls of my forbears
that I drank to the lees
of prophecy and light? Where
is the now and here of my last address
and who is this
who ages backwards from the future
like a star that’s pauperized
its abdicated shining,
and doesn’t exist
beyond the eye that heeds it?
And when I listen to myself
fumbling for keys in the hall
why is it always a thief
who walks in
and asks me what I’m doing here?

PATRICK WHITE

FOR EVERYONE IN PERTH UNDER TWENTY-FIVE WITH A FEW SPECIFIC EXCEPTIONS


FOR EVERYONE IN PERTH UNDER TWENTY-FIVE
WITH A FEW SPECIFIC EXCEPTIONS

Crazy children, willful as broken glass,
Your hearts, at best, burning arks
Of extinct animals; at worst, bad meat
Down a fresh water well: where are you going
Under so many true norths? You stumble
Like drunks off your own living roads
Into the stagnant ditches of your reeking delusions.
Perhaps I should be kind, talc your mental diapers,
Change the dressing on your festering emotions,
Abide the radiant honey your orchard hour
Pours over the dog-shit to convince yourselves
There’s a better, holier world than this
You can find no branch in, living or dead,
To perch and rest your failing wings.
Spare me the apology for your hourglass apples;
I expect more of you than most of you can bear.
Learn to fly the dragon in your own abyss;
The furious intensification of your own vital bliss.
Let the mud settle in the rain mirror.
Stop judging. In all directions from the center
Of the mind-star, it’s nothing but you,
Time, space and the dead ant on the black rose.
Is the left less than the right, the dark not
Mother of the light? Not good, not bad, not two,
How cool can you be in a used straitjacket
Even if you embroidered it yourself
And call it a pillowcase? Wake up
From the dream of your vicious isolation,
Your chronic lack of a world. What’s this
That hangs from the tip of your nose
Like the bag of dew that holds the whole of the sky
And the whole of the moon at the end
Of a hunting heron’s beak? You are
Creation; you are destruction; for you
In the time of yourself, the white stars
Array themselves as the climbing constellation
Of the wild clematis; the moon lays down
A ladder up and dead seas are sexed with fish.
Stop pretending your life is not you in all
The terrible blessings and doomed verses
Of yourself; in every event and detail, you
Meeting you, turning the pages of yourself.
All the pages, one book; all the waves, one
Emptiness, one sea; all the petals opening,
One flower; you, thirst and wine, bread
And hunger swallowing the galaxies like space.
When will you ever live up to yourself
If not for now? One night
You will drag death over you like a landscape
And blow the stars out like funeral candles
And enter the dark ageless depths of yourself.
Why not now, while this luminous body perceives
Infinite eyes blooming in the sky-fields
Of your radiant blood? Why not die now
To the lie that’s been devouring you like a serpent
Swallowing a bird’s egg long before you were born?
Show me your sky-face; show me your star-face.
Why cramp your wings inside a skull?
Get out and see how vast the sky is, you are.
The other side is this side. You can’t get from there
To here by hobbling around like a bridge on crutches
Trying to leap the mind-stream. You can’t even get
From here to here, shaking your feathers in a shell;
Even the wind, even the freedom of flight,
Until it’s released, an embryo of seeing,
Is a farce of phantoms painting dream-veils,
Not the star-bread and night-wine of real being.
How can you miss it; the truth is written
On the inside of your eyelids like a hand print
On an ancient cave wall. Not hidden or subtle
In its openness, beyond dusk and dawn,
Though the morning dove is swept by the wind
From its spring willow, and the gravedigger
Sings while he buries the bones of the sun,
Heaven, a ghetto of sinners, hell, the fire of saints,
Beyond acceptance and rejection, not two,
The whole of the unattainable truth in all
Its flawless perfection is everywhere and always
Only you, not so much as the moon on water apart
Or the waves of fire that play your cold auroral heart
Beyond this madman’s silence or that raving sage’s art.

PATRICK WHITE