Friday, February 3, 2012

YOU DON'T HAVE TO TELL ME YOU DON'T CARE


YOU DON’T NEED TO TELL ME YOU DON’T CARE

You don’t need to tell me you don’t care, not caring
is an environmental condition since humans became
too dangerous to trust their own minds as the world,
let themselves be morning doves in the phoenix-fire of the sumac,
or a light within a light like a planet in the dusk,
the pink lilac of Mercury, the flashing white
gardenia of Venus. Killing only lets you be
one thing else
after you’ve deleted all the rest. Not caring
is the shape of a final heart, the rose recast by the minerals
as stone, cell by cell, nest by nest, petrified
by the cuckoo whose young shoulder the eggs of its host out
like refugees that take over the government
that gives them shelter. Not caring
is an ancient battlefield in the morning
where crows and old women, idiots, wretches, dogs
plunder the dead lying like islands in the mist,
a cemetery of maggots that froze before
they could finish eating the horse. Not caring
is deciding to live without punctuation
because everywhere you went something got in your way
like crosswalks or streetlights, your desire for precious metals,
to drink the silver pure, frustrated everywhere
by the corroded goblets and encrustations
of people who smiled like ores and tons of granite. Not caring,
is a leftover of porous slag and a gaping quarry,
and the gifts of not caring are always accidental
and come wrapped in the skins of old enemies, a relic of fangs
that fell out like the phases of the moon
when the new ones with their upgraded toxins appeared.

You don’t have to tell me you don’t care,
I’ve lived under glaciers long enough to know
the knives of the small arctics that plunge through the heart
like kingfishers never cry; I know
the striations of stone eyes
that leave their runic watermarks
like scars and coats of arms on a shield, how
the polar caps can descend down over a skull
for thousands of years and the people revert to hides.
Not caring is a moth-eaten charter
of inalienable human blights;
chained like a telephone book to the left side
of a junkie Medusa that sold Pegasus to a riding academy
for the last hit to take off her head
long before Perseus showed up like a rehab centre.
Not caring is a way of saying
the world has let you down like an elopement
you once waited for all night at a window
when windows were made of water,
and it was an eclipse of everything you loved,
not the moon with its ladder
that came for you, the world, a foot in the door
of the opening lotus. The scarlet runner
of the iron in your blood
turned to rebar in cement to reinforce
the dead meteor of the foundation stone
that crashed through your celestial ceiling
as if God had personally thrown a rock at you
and killed your peacock in an avalanche of eyes.

Here’s a bit of not caring, here’s
the splinter of a black dwarf
that will add a little gravity to your requiem: boo hoo.
But who could mean it; who so foolish,
watching your blood-drenched weathervane
beating wingless in the air, the harbinger
of a past catastrophe, to foul the summer wind
that runs schools of stars like fish into the nets
of the auroral curtains gusting across the night sky
with a blizzard of vindictive spiders?
Everywhere the abdomens and sulphurous bouquets
of burnt match-heads. A still-life with webs.
The mummifed embryo of an aborted afterlife
and an umbilical cord undone
like a shoelace in a coffin. Not caring
is a black hole with an event horizon
that is a one-way threshold, the edge of the flat earth,
the useless wing of a collapsed dimension,
a climacteric of cannibals.

You don’t have to tell me you don’t care;
turn the rock of the world over in most,
shine a light in the corners between
the rafters in the damp basement, and you’ll see
a Nazi who wears black, kid leather gloves and breezy colognes
when he mutilates, Aryan bird wheels of destruction
frozen like galaxies and desecrated flowers in metal
arranged logically on the iconic desktop
of his universally translatable uniform, and this
is a man who doesn’t care, and this is a long, black, centipede;
and you’ll see his aspiring counterpart, a soldier
closer to home, a Chilean carabinero,
a mighty man with a can of gasoline and a condom
and a brutalized woman from the university
he rapes and burns at the side of the road back to his family,
the irisless eyes of two periods for proof he has fangs
and knows how to use his glands and organ
like a sun-tanned mamba in shades; and this
is a man who doesn’t care, and this, his machismo aside,
is a red army ant washing the general’s dirty underwear
like nettles in formic acid as he boils to be someone.
And over there, with headphones on, saline drips pumping
psychotic punk hormones through his neuronic circuitry
like flame-throwers in an air-conditioned ideology
that’s convinced it’s a tank in the deserts of Iraq,
is the boy next door who’s just made burgers and fries
of a five thousand year old Arab village
immolated like the villain of a video-game, all in the name
of a democratic republic that injects its mutable eggs
into the body of the living host
they will liberate, imperialize, and devour, and this
is a man who doesn’t care, a large, black wasp
trying to win the tiger stripes of a killer bee.
And there where the rat died dehydrated by an industrial poison,
if you look closely, beneath the sleek, moist pelt,
that puts a new spin on infestation, you’ll see
a tiny thing that calls itself a multinational corporation,
no bigger than a comma with a decimal head,
a reflex of life with the pituitary glands of a giant
who claims to own the rain in Bolivia, the arm pits
of western Africa, the people of Belize,
the grain belt of southern Saskatchewan and Alberta,
food, medicine, animals, diseases, fossils, oil, minerals, ore, genes
and the child labour of millions anywhere
there’s a dumpster with a constitution
that can’t borrow enough from the swine at the trough to eat; and this
is a legally verifiable person who doesn’t care, not a man,
but a maggot that lives in the nose
of the living and the dead like a merger in the boardroom
of a wounded world where everything is either
custard or pus. You don’t have to tell me you don’t care.

You didn’t care in Armenia, Dachau, Palestine, Sabra
and Shatila, Cambodia, Chile, Tienanmin Square, Kent State, Watts,
Wounded Knee, Algeria, Vietnam, South Africa, Manchuria, Tibet,
Siberia, El Salvador, Belfast, Uganda, Argentina, Sudan and the Balkans,
and you don’t care now that there are children
with hep-C and aids who sell their bodies
like golden chariots in the sewer to support a habit
they learned on lullaby knees like a crutch or a church.
You don’t have to tell me you don’t care;
I can see the homeless everywhere treated like the broken glass
of an emergency someone eventually pulled
as a messed-up prank on the moon;
and the afflicted, the lonely, the addicted, the dispossessed and the aggrieved
hoping to leak out of what was crushed like wine
as the last paint rag of hope to staunch the wound
unspools like a rainbow on an oilslick
and agrees against the colour of their own eyes
that the best of dreams is just
a momentary refraction of black;
but you don’t have to tell me you don’t care,
I can hear the shriek of your non-existence
unplugging the tree from the fruit, the sun from the sky,
the star from the vine, the river from the sea everywhere
until all that’s left to excavate is a grave in the air
for the blown lightbulb that can’t weld back
the merest filament of its own severed lifelines.

PATRICK WHITE

IF ALMOST ANY LEAF WILL DO


IF ALMOST ANY LEAF WILL DO

If almost any leaf will do to prove
the autumn is a flying carpet, then why should you doubt
my heart is a chainsaw buried on the moon with honours
after the last tree was felled, or the sun is the ultimate dumpster
for raving comets in decaying orbits
that want to thaw and cry and unspool the radical rivers
locked in straitjackets and handcuffs of ice, at least once
before they’re extinquished on the windowsills
of voyeuristic telescopes, wear
gardenias in the cold fire of the long hair they rinse in the light
after dyeing their carbon tresses blue? You ask
what ails me, why I won’t publish the silence
I keep revising like the first draft of a broken windowpane,
why I keep trying to root the lightning
in the cloud bed of a quick northern garden
like orchids in a storm, and I have nothing to say but skulls
that fall like apricots and exemplary moons
whose eyes were excavated by the crows
as a warning to anyone who wants to approach your throne like rain.
And it’s not the falling, it’s not the ashes and the mangled weathervanes,
the impact craters, and the trembling omens,
the salted soil and the astringencies of bitter wells
that taste of ancient snakes
that have installed me like a wary camera
in the bedlam of this mood, it’s not the people who arrive,
wave after wave like oilspills and messages in a bottle
written in blood that shrieks when you let them out
like birds from a furnace, it’s not
the endless misspelt preludes to suicide
that keep coming up like dawn
over the sleepless cities in the all-night restaurants
or the blank cheques of the children cancelled
by the dirty needles of the toe-tagged bloodbank,
those are shales of sorrow that have long lain heavy
on the fossil of my heart like crushed bells, those
are the startled eyes of roadkill
along the highways of the spring
when the perennial ambulance blooms like a white lily,
the suffering almost seasonal; but it’s not that,
I can handle that, they’re old sirens fused to harbour rocks
like foghorns that lost their voices years ago
and though I concede I’ll never be enough of a lifeboat
to rescue all the sharks from the people in the water,
and do what I can with what’s left of my buoyancy,
my devastation rarely turns dysfunctional,
and I can handle that for the sake of those who might need me;
but when you ask a poet what’s wrong like a yellow journalist
or the Red Cross in Auschwitz,
or the bleached nurse that books the car accidents into emergency,
the blossom disables the fruit, and what can anyone say
as the gray ashes of the crematoria fumaroles
appall the human orchards with baby-faced insecticides?

PATRICK WHITE