HOMO DEFECTUS

HOMO DEFECTUS

Having walked out of one millenium into the next,

an illegal immigrant crossing the border,

an alien wearing the desert for a watch,

the nights are no darker, the mornings no more

unforgivably beatific. As before and before

and before the days go by,

jaded ambulances and women I will never know,

though I come on like a freshly painted crosswalk

with two virgin passports

and a green card to pick lettuce on the moon.

Eschatologically deranged,

I was prepared for a big change

that no one else would notice, not the debt-collecting goons

of Apocalypse and Armageddon

that show up at the door

to break your kneecaps like fortune-cookies

if you’re not homeless by tomorrow, not

the rotten needlepoint of those old dooms,

but something with stars and grass and wild water

a bag of pot, wine, cigarettes and a woman beside me,

midnight at noon, charging the air

with the sexual wyrd of her approaching eclipse.

I thought, what the fuck, everyone’s entitled

to a soft sundial

in the available dimension of the future

even if it’s de rigeur to cultivate the bleak,

and who knows, I might start a trend.

Let no one divulge the improbability of a dream.

Now I’m eleven years into the twenty-first century

and my heart is a nightwatchman in a morgue

looking for a flashlight in the dark,

trying to keep the light on long enough

to see if I can recognize anyone.

There are more ways than one to get home,

or so I tell myself leaving the solar system

like a space probe

into the indigo realms of the open,

packed with symbols and curios

that might pass for signs of intelligence

should I meet a sphinx.

I’m grounded in the emptiness,

a seed on the wind with nowhere to root.

And though I may have unfolded like a flower

in the radiance of the sun,

I was dropped from a bridge

into a river that has no banks

by the hand of a faithless lover.

Exiled by exiles into exploration

I keep sending back pixels and poems,

postcards from the edge of nowhere,

but I don’t know if anyone is listening

as the earth recedes

to the perfect point of a vertex

and disappears among the stars.

And it’s not that I’m running away, it’s just

that oblivion is sometimes a means

of keeping things in perspective

as I proceed deeper into these dwarfing spaces,

an ambassador with a suicide note

from a self-destructive planet

screaming out for attention. Contact.

A universe we can panic into caring,

something astounding

that knows how to love

in a way we couldn’t manage, a brilliance

that doesn’t horde armies in the shadows,

an enlightenment that isn’t a growlight in a closet.

But do forgive the voyeurism of my longing

for something better than I left,

there are no echoes here

and no one burns a candle in the window,

or slips a tormented apology under the door

to heal the wound of my departure

with the sin-eating maggots

of beautiful lies. Not to rehearse

old catastrophes on a revolving stage in modern dress,

the litany of horrors on the playbill,

or waltz with the heavy velvet

of theatre curtains at a gala of crude beginnings in a mosh-pit,

the metaphors all elbows and bullies,

and the music, the head-banging metronomic mania

of amplified crustaceans, a swan-song for Nazis,

but the history of our encyclopedic species

is still the unholy shriek

of a cosmic ape in an abattoir and our indifference,

the universal background radio hiss

of the big bang reduced to a whimper,

the white noise that attunes this cacophony

of crime and folly and war to our stupefied silence.

I’ve been gone for such a long time, tell me,

are the gas-chambers empty, do we still

turn humans into soap

to wash the blood from our hands, have

the concentration camps been closed in the off-season,

do the children still drink from sewers

and play hide and seek

in a garden of ripening land-mines,

the stumps of their arms and legs,

the Venus de Milos and Apollo Belevederes

of savaged dolls? Is hunger

still the direction of prayer for millions,

and disease the fly that shadows them?

How is it with the rich man and the poor?

Is the daughter of one

still the whore of the other

in charity matinees for medicated mothers?

Does dawn still prime the ghosts

in the mass graves of empty wallets?

Are the young still free

to find their way in the world like roadkill,

or has ignorance squared the circle at last

and turned the corner on depravity?

Do the corporations still own the rain in Bolivia,

and patents pending on the genes

of hybrid animals, logos and slumlords

in the ghettos of gravity? Tell me,

before I mistake a garbage barge

for an island in the distance,

are the budgets of small countries

still awarded to movie stars and athletes

for a trivial excellence

while seventy-five million people die of AIDS

in the next five years of global warming

and there’s a young genius

with a cure and an answer

dying of cancer in front of a firing squad?

Do the teen-agers in Bagdhad

still draw the contagion out

with a poultice of explosives

while adolescents on ecstasy in L.A.

desiccate their spinal fluids

in a Roman orgy of wheelchairs?

Are the redneck rap-stars of rural Perth,

the ‘wanna be’ pimps with faces like cow-pies

still sharing infected needles

behind the empty foodbank?

Has anything been settled?

Are the generals satisfied

and the purse-snatching governments

weary of stealing from their own?

Is there a school

that doesn’t drink spit from another man’s mouth

for anyone with a mind, a science

that isn’t the bitch of money and power,

a religion that doesn’t teach a child to cower,

an art that isn’t the atrocity of the hour?

Look me straight in the eye

like a satellite or the Hubble scope or Houston

and tell me has anything changed

with the falling of these first few grains,

the last eleven years of my dwindling out

in the new era of the hourglass? Are the old

still wise alone behind a wasted windowpane

and experience an ore the fools cannot refine?

Are children taught to crave

before they learn to give

and the trees of the city still in concrete and chains?

Are the cruel romanced

and the gentle scorned, the best

belittled, and the least exalted?

Are there old men in the park

trying to stare themselves to death

and five hundred chemicals in the very next breath,

is the sky a cataract, the rain a poison tear,

the earth, contaminated real estate?

When we turned the page

of the voluminous century

to read on in search

of indubitable proof

of our renewable virginity

were the hundred million people

we killed in the last saeculum

of our genocidal curriculum

somewhere in the footnotes?

But you needn’t answer that.

I’m only talking to myself

in this huge, mute, brutal place

where the earth isn’t even a microbe

and time is defied by the enormity of space

that lies before me like an ancient future

that has already happened here and now

faster than light

and disappeared without a trace

a waterbird, or the shadow of something in the night,

or a flame the fire gave to the wind,

or the name of someone written in sand,

who tried to understand

the long disgrace of the human race

through years of rage and tears,

and sent out like a dove to look for land,

epochs of blood in the murderous starmud,

buried his face in the valley of his hands

where he used to pray for deliverance,

and nothing to say that would make a difference

left, unmanned.

PATRICK WHITE