Tuesday, November 6, 2012

STUPID, STUPID WORLD FULL OF LIES


STUPID, STUPID WORLD FULL OF LIES

Stupid, stupid world full of lies, self-deceit, greed,
conspiratorial stinging nettles, leeching bills, vampiric,
cutting off the flow of things like tiger-mussels,
hillbilly hippies beating up their girlfriends on crack,
all these egotistic puff ball mushrooms with labial gills
mythically inflated by one night’s good rain
into albino planets, people who have more keys to heaven
than they have locks on hell, abandoned school bells
that go on talking to themselves like wandering scholars
light years after the children grew old at their perennial recess
and the moths and the mice and the mildew
keep putting out books epilogues after everyone’s
forgotten how to read the signs of their own decay.

Between the horns of the moon that’s been thrown
like a goat skull into the wishing well of my heart,
roadie spiders string my harp for me like false eyelashes
in the green room, and the nerves of the mirrors
are shattered into the frayed deltas of the ropes of hope
endangered elephants are trying to climb up to heaven on.
The thin-skinned blissed-out gardenias of Maharajji
are wilting under the eyeshadow of their Mary K cosmetics
as their rainbows grow vicious as vegan dogs
in a spiritual junkyard of razorwire and foodchains
that have overextended their supply lines like the umbilical cords
of kites and puppets and angels on the strings of arachnids.
Too pure for me. I’d be afraid of getting myself on their floors.
Tracking starmud in from the mindstream I’ve been floating down
from one neuron to the next, one town to another,
like the new moon of an origami swan in a scenic calendar
of apocalyptic moments in the life of a hand grenade
people keep pulling on like the handle of an empty fridge.

Count me among the Andalusian vandals of the delinquent dragons
who keep writing obscene truths in lampblack and terza rima
on the walls where the flamethrowers post their prophecies.
I was born to burnish gold. I was born to dry the eyes
of weeping diamonds. I was born to wire the rainbow bridges
with satchel charges of fireflies and lightning for demolition
so everybody can learn to swim through stone
like glaciers to the other side of their polarized cataracts.
And whenever I look at a house of worship built on quicksand
I’ve got to laugh like an avalanche of meteors
at the self-serving lustrations of their pretentious extinctions
as the world blazes all around them like a halo of inflammable hairspray.
I’ve got holy wars of my own to go to that won’t be disarmed
by the soft swords of their beeswax candles surrendering
to such a little flame of life at the tip of a limp wick
that trembles with every breath it takes like a feather in a furnace.

I see the mad dogs like arsonists with hydrophobia
frothing at the mouth for war, citing ancient conflagrations
from the burnt out scriptures of their sacred matchbooks
raving at the supernovas that ignore them like ingrown solar flares
that couldn’t stand up to a drought, let alone a forest fire.
What good is inspiration if it hasn’t got a detonator?
Or enlightenment if all it does is ignite a funeral pyre,
cremate a desire to live like a peer of the dynastic galaxies
you were born among with the silver spoon of a universe in your mouth
whether you use it to cook crack, take your medicine
like a human suffers an excruciating transformation,
or let the hummingbirds sip from it like syringes
flagging snakestongues of blood in celestial sugar water?

And all the warrior poets buffed like medicine bags
of talcum powder, and all the healers selling
batches of bad heroin like dealers to the high school kids
who used to steal their mother’s oxycontin from the medicine chest
so they could rail the yellow brick road like roadkill.
All the vates, seers and shamans consulting
prophetic pundits and polls as the critics
repeal the fate of the artist before she’s born,
cuckoos taking over the nests of better birds,
parasitic guests taking over the house of the host
as the journalists turn from objective observers
to political spiders weaving the webs they spin as the news
and the audience, breaking mutually consenting protocol
gets up on stage with Hamlet and turns a play into a talkshow
for the fifteen minutes of pop-tart celebrity left on their i-phones.

Originality that used to emanate from the roots up
like the light coming out of a dark universe
now seated like an air traffic controller in an orchard
like the wind assigning runways and instructions
on where to take off and land to a riot of blossoms
with pre-conceived flightpaths and well-known destinations.
Creative writing professors in the literary mills
grinding the grist for whole new generations
of mimetically enculturated oxen
to keep the wheels turning of a lucrative careers bank
that used to be the calling of the insanely inspired
too busy working in the visionary mines of their genius
looking for jewels of insight to waste their potential
on getting a job regurgitating words for baby pelicans,
masticating poetry into spiritual pulp fiction
or sipping them from other men’s mouths as if
spit were the nectar of the muse they’ve never met.
The real dragons, their spines lined with sundials,
really don’t care how many chapbooks you’ve published in a year
nor how many times per capita you’ve mentioned butterflies
just to ensure your fan club you’re still sensitive to beauty
or where you’re reading next like a matchbook
burning in the valley of Tuwa or whether your chimney-spark
expiring under the stars is an inferno of unignited creosote
caked in your throat like a callous of black matter
or the ore of the braille alphabet blocks you throw
like snake eyes in dice playing your randomness off
against the lottery of your autobiography copied and pasted
like a colony of red army ants putting your books together
like a folio of butterfly wings perfectly bound for the ant heap.

PATRICK WHITE

ANYONE CAN SAY WHAT THEY FEEL


ANYONE CAN SAY WHAT THEY FEEL

Anyone can say what they feel
but how few can sing what they dream.
You put your heart into any art
and people will follow you like a bloodstream.
In self defence against the omnipotence
of being interdependently originated,
you can substantiate your absence
to prove you’re not living in the same world
we all do, but where’s that going to get you in the end?
You can true your delusions anyway you want
but that’s not going to clear you for the truth.
The destroyed see deeper than those who survived.
That man puts a straitjacket on
everytime he says he’s arrived.

Just because it’s absurd doesn’t mean
it isn’t believable. Me sitting here
writing this to a caste of albino stars
I haven’t reconfigured into a constellation yet
because my imagination keeps shape-shifting me
like a gust of fireflies into myriad myths of origin
since I realized, cosmically speaking, one size
doesn’t fit all like a house of transformation
in an Etruscan zodiac. Or a prayer wheel.
Or the ecliptic of a mystic head band
still bound to the skull of a Druid who died young.

Fifty years, a poet, but I don’t expect
this is as mad as it’s going to get.
I’ve been deepening my ignorance aesthetically
for light years, but when I cry for things I regret
my tears are still wet, and my mindstream suggests
there was no other way of flowing at the time.
I hang on the hook of the moon prophetically
until the pain grows profound
and ten scribes in a tower write it all down.
I am blessed. I am cursed. I am hunted and ignored.

I love disingenuously to keep from being bored.
And when there’s nothing else for the fire to feed on
I offer it my body, my soul, my solitude
and the rare acquiescence of a tumultuous mind
like the third eye of a hurricane with a corneal implant.
I don’t keep the impersonality of what I feel about life
in a little drawer with a skull on a keychain
I use to master the coffin doors of the slumlords
that won’t open of their own accord
like rosebuds in a rusty locket that’s come unhinged.

I don’t pour the ocean into a teacup anymore
as much as I used to and there’s a little more wisdom
in my love lyrics I haven’t completely
taken to heart yet, but I’m trying. I stand
an intimate distance away from the things I cherish.
I’m dying as we all are, but it doesn’ t feel
as if I’m going to perish. My emotions are ageless
and inspiration’s only the whisper of a star away
and though my dark energy keeps expanding the starfields
further apart, so I have to walk further
to find a wild flower I can identify with,
the dark’s beginning to shine like a black candle
with my spinal cord dipped in serpent fire
like a total eclipse of dragon’s blood as its wick.

I rave like the vision of a sacred clown who’s become
the misfit of his own crazy wisdom, heretically so,
to live up to the standards of my own disobedience,
a saintly truant in the labyrinths of spiritual malfeasance.
A shepherd of wolves, I don’t drive the stars
up into the high fields like a small herd of scapegoats
like a hard rock on a mountain keeping
its fossils to itself like apocalyptic alibis
for the silence in the voice of the void that unwords me.

No truth ever mattered a damn to me
if it defeated people who were just trying
to get on with not knowing what to do with their lives.
No beauty ever took my breath away for long
that wasn’t emotionally siderealized
or hadn’t drowned like a sorceress on an island
in the oceans of the black rose of a new moon.
I prefer to look at the blessings of life
through a broken window more than
the polished mirror of a purified mind
blinded by its own blazing to the diamonds
that pour like stars from the eyes of weeping meteors
that have initiated the extinction
of too many, too much, without rancour
for the fragility of the afterlives in the ashes
that emerged from the inside out
into the available dimensions of a random future.

Time might observe the protocols of its waterclocks
for some who still drink from wishing wells
and hourglasses that are always pouring another
for the road, but in the intimacy of my solitude
time acts extemperaneously upon my heart
like a stranger who could always feel his way past
what he didn’t know about what could hurt him
if he ever stopped long enough anywhere to find out.
I’m grateful to the abyss for the black hole
in the centre of my life that can’t be fulfilled
galaxy after galaxy at a feast of light that keeps
my appetite for the moonrise of the mystery
intrigued and hungry. My mind was never an experiment
nor my heart the rube of experience.
I didn’t map the rain to know where to go.
I let the mountain be my goat-footed guide to the top
and when it came time to come down,
I won my wings falling toward paradise
with more joy in taking the plunge
than I relished in the angelic aviary of my arrival
where nobody jumps unless they’ve got a parachute on.

Buff the risk with a safety net or you’ll candle
like a daylily all the way down into an early grave
people used to say to me when I was a young precipice
ferociously faithful to exploring the nether depths of myself
like a comet jumping the orbitals of a dark halo
to shed a little light like a petal of the sun
on why I’d rather perish in the night like a firestorm
on a purple passage of the wind, than blossom
like the wildflower of a savage mystic
in the genetically engineered garden of a false dawn.

PATRICK WHITE