THE BRIEF HISTORY OF NOW

THE BRIEF HISTORY OF NOW

They cancelled the foundation stone

like quicksand, a god, or a bad cheque; finally

after thousands of years of watching her change in a window,

her lingerie spread softly on the clouds,

they seized the moon and raped her

and chained her to a bedpost by the neck. Science

denounced the sloppy dynasty of flesh and bone

and standing in the power circle of its denuded magic

disappeared in a delirium of mystical bosons

that added gravity to the argument that life

was neither divinely humorous nor infernally tragic,

but the astronomical defect of agitated genes.

No one really knows what that means,

but everyone took them at their word

and sacrificed their first-born like obsolete cell-phones

on the altars of the absurd. And in the leafless tree no birds sang

exalted by the morning, and without a warning

that it had had enough of sweeping up the mess,

the wind walked out with seeds in its hair and everywhere

the doctors listened for a pulse, a gust, a breath, a breeze,

nothing was heard but the silence of ancient vacancies

sphinxing the unmoved deserts with time.

There was nothing left to celebrate, nothing sublime

that could lift the human spirit

out of the post-diluvian slime of random selection

to commemorate its myth of origin

with a shrine or an obelisk, or, at the very least,

the good beginning of a spiritual erection.

Bread didn’t rise, and the sun in the east

was a mess of uncertainty and sad yeast.

Even the darkness lost its charisma and taste

and the night was no longer an act of grace

but a junkie turned out with the battered face of the moon.

Hard, hard, hard, the obscenity of human lovelessness

that sipped its sacrament from a coke-spoon

and stripped of its creeds, when down on its knees

to confess the infallibility of its helplessness. The worst

grew bolder than porn and celebrity children

that no one missed on the back of milk cartons

cursed the day they were born. The experts and the wise

pondered the weight of their proof like gold

and alloys of the tempered lies they once foretold,

calculated the infinite odds against the recovery of the truth,

and breaking into a sweat of febrile fears

distinguished the tenure of their correct careers

by calling in a bomb-threat from a telephone-booth in arrears.

Baghdad nosed among its ruins like a missile.

Rwanda cropped its people with machetes;

the gangrene of the Sudan reeked and ran

and everywhere that Jesus walked the Promised Land,

apocalypse was wired to a parked van

as the U.N. and the Vatican proof-read Paul’s epistle,

whistling in the dark about a veto and a thistle

thorning the heart of charity with reservations

that calmed the queasy conscience of the brave and sleazy nations

with press conferences and funeral orations

that talced the rabies of the demonically depraved.

So that in the end, with heartfelt regrets, no one was saved

from anything, not the butchers in the boardrooms

compounding third-world debts, not

the designer generals in their new-age epaulets, not

the testaments of never again that everyone forgets,

not even the babies in their prams and bassinets

waiting to have their asses wiped like bayonets.

And then the bottom fell out. Greed spoke like a nuclear tumour.

And all that was left of civilization

raised on the ethics of deprivation

from the ziggurats of ancient Sumer

to the stock-markets of New York

died like a vicious rumour.

PATRICK WHITE