THE LIVING WAX MUSEUM OF THE HUMANLY GROTESQUE

THE LIVING WAX MUSEUM OF THE HUMANLY GROTESQUE

The living wax museum of the humanly grotesque,

the affable mutants, the butterfly minds

armoured by their innocence against their deaths,

bells of fat that responded to everything they were asked

like jocular coffins at ease with their catastrophes,

and the tough made shy by the nemetic streets

and the city roses that came in different shades of lipstick

and chirped about the brutality of their boyfriends

celebrating their psychotic jealousy like a badge of love

as the snake they tried to domesticate by kissing it

on the locket of its head as a sign of respect for death,

the lingham in the yoni, struck them repeatedly in the jugular

like the tinfoil shaktis of black and blue working girls

if they so much as looked at another man

for anything more than money could buy for half an hour,

one ray of light awry, and back to the end of the line.

And the scorpions who administered justice to the poor

as if the law were just a special form of betrayal.

And the commissars of good who stepped

on other people’s hearts to reheel their boots

in the name of their militant ethics slumming

for a photo-op among the peasants they recruited

to sacrifice their lives on the altars

that fattened them up awhile to send their alien gods

a loveletter like a rose of blood from an abattoir.

And those who suffered the afflictions of Job

quietly in the corners out of earshot of the violent ones

away from the shadows that sought them out

like spiders with compound eyes and ice-pick fangs

blooding their colours in gangs of arachnids

that came up on you from behind under cover

of a moonrise that violated the sanctity of your asylum

with the pellucid integrity of a rabid syringe

anaesthetizing you with fear like an ice-age

afraid of water. And the daughters who slipped

through the labial tent flaps of the surrealistic circuses

where they tried to ride the snake like ballerinas

on horseback, but wound up being trivialized

by ringmasters with whips and hoops of fire

they jumped through like caged tigresses

for the amusement of their terrorized kids.

Old men like potatoes who’d worked hard all their lives

watching their lives leak out like the waterclocks of urine

they couldn’t hold back like time anymore

without wetting their pants on the porch

as if they were chronically afraid of something.

And the snowbirds and dandelions gone to seed,

old women worn out like looms, crone phases of the moon,

embroidering their pillowcases trying to

surgically stitch up their inoperable dreams

with threads of fate too weak to heal their wounds anymore.

They’re all still here in my mind staggering

under the heavy lift and load of humanity they shouldered

like the bearers of burdens and drawers of water,

slave nations in the ungrateful lotteries of the chosen ones

that buried them like the Burgess Shale

in the Cambrian depths of my mountainous past,

broken, lost, rejected, bent, predatory, victimized,

used, abused, forgotten and mocked like the spiritual duff

and social detritus of last year’s effluvial autumn.

The indelible shadows of a darkness I couldn’t shake off

however many books I read, or languages I mastered

to baffle what whispered in my exiled heart

in the towering shadow of Babel, or poems I wrote

in pursuit of an earthly excellence I could lavish

like my aristocratic poverty on the esoteric beauty of the stars

as I laboured to squander my genius on mystic insights

that kept me from soiling my lunar flightfeathers

in the tarpits and sticky eclipses of starmud that clung to the past.

Freaks, pariahs, outcasts, the insensibly crude,

boisterously loud about their garish bodily functions,

the mad visionaries whose febrile skin always smelled

like mildewed rags however many baths

they took in their graves like compromised shamans

still trying to get their spirits to come clean

with the animal world long after it had gone extinct.

How far, how long it is from childhood that it’s taken me

all these labyrinths of lightyears in a leper colony

trying to grow a new head on a hydra to replace

the prophetic skull that could speak of a future

in the ancestral tongues of the dead that up until now

excluded you from the graveyards of my occlusive heart

like the sacred syllables of creosote and crows

caught in my throat as if my voice cherry-picked

spiritual vowels from the bruised windfalls

of my earth bound consonants grubby with life

shaken from the green boughs of the tree I sang in

above the damaged roots of the humans I sprang from

like a sapling from the heartwood of a decaying stump.

And embrace you, I do. At last. Deservedly or not.

As a sign of self-respect. I celebrate the lustre of the ore,

the flawed jewel, the rusty cankers on the sword,

the missing links in the foodchain of toothless carnivores,

the luckless wishbones that broke like the bull harps

of private Babylons buried in the deserts of the moon

where there is no wind and the sterility of the silence

has never carried a sound like a waterbird

disappearing like a song waning into the distance.

In a prodigal flashflood of compassionate insight

I flow into the dry creekbeds and stagnant tidal pools

of your disembodied lives, the hollow carapaces

of your false dawns gouged out like eyes of loaded dice.

Scorned, humiliated, alcoholic hierarchies of feudal squalor,

I observe the fragility of your baronial protocols

so as not to begrudge you a shadow of the splendour

of your belated normalcy, your upgraded mundanity,

the under rated privilege of being overlooked

like everyone else in the greater scheme of things.

Excruciating agonies of isolation en masse. Status, at last.

PATRICK WHITE