THE DEMONICALLY ENLIGHTENED SEE FURTHER INTO HELL

THE DEMONICALLY ENLIGHTENED SEE FURTHER INTO HELL

The demonically enlightened see further into hell

than the light the angel eyes see by. Who knows

a woman better than when you’ve lost her?

So I know the bliss of heaven as I know

the depth of the regrets of Pandemonium.

Both ends of the telescope. The vapour of the rose

and the smoke of oil fires throwing snakes

and black feathers on the pyres of the wildflowers

that shed their petals like scales. A white star

in the arms of a black hole it’s dancing around binarily.

The via positiva coiled around the via negativa

like the copulative way of day and night,

helical theta waves killing and healing,

changing their spin contemporaneously

in synchronicity with the charged starfields

in every creative moment we live here to shine

a light out of the darkness of awareness

we haven’t seen before. And I say,

prophetically hooded in snake skin,

this interim in the late fall, this fateful pause

in the roseate third eye of a galactic hurricane

bearing down upon us like diamond-edge blades

in a threshing field full of scarecrows

that incorporated the crop into the strawdogs

of their bodies, is the Age of Disappointment,

the bursting of the myriad balloons of the multiverse

blooded like roses hemorrhaging on their own thorns.

We grow older faster than we used to

trying to keep up with the pace of our longevity

fleeing from the light of the way things are,

one jump ahead of our youth, as if the ship

were abandoning the plague rat of time

by scuttling itself on the reefs of a foreign eternity

wearing the deathmask of the moon

that gapes down upon us all in shock

at what we’ve done to ourselves in the green room

like an atlas of shattered mirrors slashing out at us

in a frenzy of reflections that make things clear as blood.

Disappointment is the prelude to desecration.

And though we all hype our optimistic overviews

of the text to come, we haven’t seen anything yet

like the wind that will knock us out of our words

like the empty nests of the birds that had heard enough

to stop singing before us. The terrible stillness

of the first sign of a red alert in heaven

and the great silence that overwhelms

the air raid sirens of hell. And all

the opinionated lighthouses and foghorns

that made a career out of not taking their warnings

seriously enough, snuffed out and blinded

like the mouths and eye-sockets of prophetic skulls

in the decaying orbits of an avalanche of asteroids

taking their lead from the insurgent cells of shepherd moons.

A ravening species of life that eats itself

out of house and home like a cannibalistic planet

that lives off its own, gone antibiotically insane.

But even a total eclipse doesn’t cover the sun wholly

and the corona gleams through the valleys

of the lunar mountains like Bailey’s Beads.

And there’s even a dim halo around the rim of a black hole.

And among the condemned you can sometimes see

a begrudging kind of merit that shines out

of the slag and slurry of the excruciating transformations

of the ore that’s being refined by suffering and experience,

a black jewel that radiates dark energy

even in the false dawn of an unworthy afterlife.

Just below the scar tissue of the earth’s crust,

seven kilometers down in a diamond mine

blind on the coal road to the light,

thermophilic bacteria have regenerated life on the planet

after near annihilation three times.

So if any of us survive ourselves in this empire

of mineralized cells and exotic metals

out of our exuberant neurons what photons

of our bioluminescence might jump orbitals

and spread like foxfire across the scorched earth again,

casting the ashes of stars in the urns of the rose-hips

on the roots trying to cling in the cold

to some notion of spring that keeps their bloodstream

blooming in their underground hearts

like one of the more graceful arts of survival?

PATRICK WHITE

WHEN YOU'VE AVERAGED OUT YOUR CRCUCIALS

WHEN YOU’VE AVERAGED OUT YOUR CRUCIALS

When you’ve averaged out your crucials

and you’ve walked in the light and you’ve walked

in the shadows of things your eyes still taste of

though you’ve set a star as the moral compass

of your cloudy destination, and it’s following you

down a long stray thread of a road, the smart money

bets on doing some good in the world

you may not even be aware of, let alone

expect payback for as if you were doing business

not gambling on an intuitionally calculated risk

its probably better to leave a sweeter cachet to the place

for your having been here, chicory by the side of the road,

or wild orchids in the marsh, by the addition

of one flower more than to desecrate your life

with bitterness, resentment, the indifference of ambition

when its heart gargles with an inhumane antiseptic

to keep from being infected by the human in its bloodstream.

You don’t have to arrange paradigms of shining

into some kind of mandalic starmap unless you want to.

Giving something up isn’t the same as adding yourself to it.

Even if you foreknow you’re doomed to lose, total eclipse,

if you’re a real gambler, you lose with flare, like a solar corona.

You’re intrigued by the unfolding of the road you took,

the river you’re running, the rapids in the mindstream

you’re about to shoot down the middle in an inflatable life raft

in the spring run off of the waterclock of a reverential northern river.

It might be important to seek

the eventual forgiveness of the night

for what we’ve done to it, treating it as a reward

for breathing our way through another day in the light.

But the stars aren’t listening to the alibis

we’re whispering in the dark to our selves.

They labour under the cowbells of their own myths of origin.

But you can always do a little good in the world.

The whole place is wounded. No shortage of opportunity.

You can drive the ambulance back to the hospital.

You can be the atom that decides the outcome

of a cosmic event, so slight are the actions of the random,

chaos in action, it just takes one to light up

infinite time and space moment by moment

and blow it out just as quickly to enhance the night,

the pulsar of a firefly in a lighthouse of dark matter.

You ever wonder how many messiahs

have come and gone from the world

without ever once having heard of themselves?

If you don’t like to drink spit out of the public fountains

of other people’s mouths, though they exhale rainbows in the mist

maybe it’s time to taste your own to see if it’s sweet or not.

When things are real, not solid, nothing’s diminished,

nothing’s enlarged, because size is no longer relevant

in a world of wavelengths that have given up living like particles.

And forms are more provisional than cast in bronze.

Waifs of the air, maple leaves cast on the mindstream

covering their own reflections with the fans and hand mirrors

they carry like accessories to their own deathmasks.

Hard to make a wax mould of a dream, an emotion, or an insight.

The mystery of life isn’t an interpretation

waiting to be deciphered any way you like,

though you’re free to do this with the impunity

of a crossroad puzzle. Its silence is a deeper eloquence

than that, and when it expresses itself it’s as immediate

as starlight on water. Its spontaneity never hesitates

to shock us with the impersonal beauty

of a moonrise over the lake in a lunar flood of wonder.

Or some small act of love that’s denounced by the doer

as a foolish way to live against the odds, as soon as it’s done.

Everybody’s on death row here. No one gets out alive

or unwounded. Sparrows and stars and houseflies

pass freely through the bars, and the wind at night

whistles through them like the vocal cords of a harp.

Would it hurt to pass a cigarette through them

to someone in front of a firing squad of stars

or write a loveletter for someone who can’t read it?

PATRICK WHITE

ANSWERING THE WOLF

ANSWERING THE WOLF

Answering the wolf.

Its agony, my own.

Its long howl of irreproachable pain

enough to silence the mountains

with trepidation before something holy.

Desecration. A photo. Two dozen wolf corpses

pouring over the tail-gate of a pick-up.

The bounty of two happy hunters

kneeling beside their rifles

as if something had been accomplished

it would be worth telling their children about.

Hard truth. Here is a human. My species.

It can do this to anything that lives.

From blue algae to Auschwitz,

Uganda, Syria, Wounded Knee.

Whales, buffalo, Sabra and Shatila, the Amazon,

twenty-five million famished children a year,

an avalanche of wolves at the back of a pick-up.

Beyond wanting to know why

there’s this black spot

in people’s hearts and minds,

where sentience turns rabid,

where intelligence seems

the most inspired enabler of death,

where the wine of empathy turns into an oil slick,

how do you answer the innocence

of the wolf, the child, the old growth forest?

Life gets in the way of our enterprising hatred of it?

You kill a wolf. You kill a whole landscape.

You kill a wolf. And the moon marks you out

with an X on your forehead

for a thousand excruciating transformations.

You kill a wolf. And the rivers

will turn against you and bide their time

until you come down to the water to drink

from your own blood-stained reflection.

The sun will begrudge you a shadow.

The wind feel fouled by your smell

like dead meat in your own house well.

Even the maggots who will come

to your heart one day

like undertakers and garbage-collectors

will look upon it not

as the virtue of a noble enemy

but as an undertaking that’s beneath them.

They will not stoop to clean your body like a wound.

Wolf-spirit, wolf-heart, wolf-mind, wolf-mother,

even the white-tailed buck laments

this atrocity of psychotic caprice

that slaughters simply because it can.

I see the moon bare its fangs in proxy for these

and the stars dip their spears in poison.

And I will dance around the fire with you

mad with grief at this wounded eye of life

and smear my face with the ashes of a deathmask

to regret everything about me that is

pathogenetically deranged and inhuman.

To rid myself of the reek of those who could do this.

Do this to our own. Do this to natives.

Do this to wolves. Do this to the air and the water

they breathe and drink from. Do this ultimately

to themselves when there’s no one left to care or notice.

These kill to eat.

These eat to kill. You and all like you

who did and condone this, I ask you,

what will you do with the bodies of these wolves?

You never ravened for the meat;

was it their death that glutted your heart?

Were you compensating for some hidden impotence

giddy with the knowledge you could

extinguish life anywhere on the planet on a whim at will?

Were you urinating on your own wombs,

the graves of your ancestors because

you’re the illegitimate runt of your own myth of origins?

Are you angry at life because you were born?

Do you despise the rose and admire the thorn?

I see the narrowing in the eyes of the ancient taboos

you’ve violated like thresholds with your boots on,

bruising sacred ground without knowing

where it is you walk or the risk you take,

the danger you will encounter,

because you have been made deaf, dumb, and blind

robbed of your eyes, ears, tongue, heart, mind

insensate to what now lifts its nose to the wind

to find you when you least expect it

from the least expected quarter.

These you killed. You killed in the concrete,

and exonerate the act in the abstract.

These were blood, flesh, fur, bone, each

with a mystic specificity of its own,

wild, free, whole, intelligent, and communal

each the work of some unknown muse of life,

the spontaneity of some lavish genius,

the inspiration of the same dark mother

that never creates the same masterpiece twice.

These had seeing, mind, emotion.

These had been touched by the mystery of life

and in the shrines of the trees and the mountains

offered their delirium up to the moon

like drunks beneath a vacant window

singing to their own reflections. These

accepted their homelessness in this strange place

without doing it any harm as if

there were no other place they could belong to.

These were at peace with themselves and the earth

in a way you weren’t born with the courage to imagine.

These were alert and alive and quick with curiosity.

These were noble without lording it over anyone.

Were they executed for their innocence?

Was there not enough room in your cage

for their kind of freedom? Did you envy

an understanding they had among each other

you haven’t enjoyed once in the last twenty years

you stayed drunk as a gun lobby in a lazy-boy

staring back at the glass eyes of the animals

looking down upon you like a decapitated zoo

with the pity of the unaccusing

that anything that’s ever lived

could be so full of self-hatred,

so full of disgust at the inadequacy of themselves

in the midst of so much spontaneous sufficiency,

from blue algae on over to blue whales,

could be so estranged from their inalienable nature,

could be so vindictively blind

they’d rather shoot the eyes out of the stars

and finger the braille of the bullet holes

they’ve put in the side of their coffins

like a mailbox with a return address on it

than open their own and read the writing on the wall.

Does Cain still blame God

that his sacrifice was unacceptable?

The farmer! The farmer! Not the hunter?

The meat of the hunter not sweet to Her nostrils?

So you murder your brother

and then you murder the animals

as if they somehow let you down.

And in the death shroud of the dark mother

she sends a crow not a dove,

not the wolf, nor the eagles of Rome

to teach you how to bury the dead,

to teach you how to sow the earth you’ve salted

with meat and bullets and how they only bloom

and come to fruition in you

like self-inflicted wounds square

in the third eye of your own infertility.

There used to be hunters wise enough to know

the animals they stalked were meant as a gift of a gift

not something they ripped off like a petty thief.

Now when they catch a whiff of you coming

it isn’t a hunter they run from but

that sickly-sweet freakish smell of death

that clings to the skin of an undertaker

who moonlights as a serial killer

in the deathmask of a terminal disease.

PATRICK WHITE