THE GREAT SPRING NIGHT PIVOTS LIKE A
PRAYERWHEEL
The great spring night pivots like a
prayerwheel
on the inconsequential circumstances
and events
of an unforeseen order of chaos that
doesn’t give many hints
of what’s to come. The larval nymphs
of hibernial dreams,
sleepwalking through the soporific
winter, comatose as snow
are stripping off their eras of
clothing like space-suits
and drying their wings like stained
glass straight out of the kiln
adapting to the new medium like an open
window
breaking up like a miscarriage of ice
in desolate bays north of here.
A pregnant pause in the air. The
premature hilarity
of late revellers liberating hot tears
of alcohol
on the grey acreage of the X-rated
pavement down below,
where unknown movie stars write their
names in wet cement.
This is the phoney war, the sitzkrieg,
the false dawn of Armageddon.
The snapping turtles keep their helmets
on.
Felonious spirits man the nightwatch
like roosting crows.
The nemetic depths have had enough of
superficial catastrophes
crying wolf every time some celebrated
non entity
breaks another painted fingernail like
the last crescent of the moon
just to flaunt the waning mutability of
the law
as Caligula makes his horse a senator
at a see through toga party for
transparent government
throwing acid in the eyes of the
oracles who can see lightyears beyond
the pernicious longevity of their
corporate gene pools.
The moguls, ghouls, and mutants of neo
feudalism
crusading like iron chastity belts
against birth control
in the lobbies of brothel hotels and
banks with the room service
of slummy hospitals and debtor’s
prisons for the poor.
Everybody knows they’re swimming
through stone
in the cement galoshes of Al Capone as
the gangsters
run for office to be of future use to
their own careers.
The apple bloom of the human spirit is
remedially cankered.
The northern lights that no one has
ever lifted like the veils of Isis
are the delirious fever of a solar
infection breaking out in sunspots
like mold on an orange. Say it isn’t
so, Joe, say it isn’t so.
Yesterday’s grailquest to heal the
ailing kingdom
is the dark labyrinth of today’s
video game
stockpiling weapons against the
expressionless zombies
of the walking dead hiding behind the
coffin lids
of their homeless graves like
slow-witted assassins
trying to ambush Seal Team 6 like an
unemployable working class.
At this preeminent hour the street is
lined with eyeless windows
into the human soul downloading an app
to livestream its dreams
in high definition like a Caravaggio
painting that invites you
to stick your finger in the bullet
holes like a doubting Thomas
the wound in Christ’s side
chalk-marked like gore on the sidewalk.
Someone’s overturning the gravestones
of the angels
that kept their ancient places like a
Confederate cemetery.
The barons in their hill forts look
down from their overviews
surveying all they own like paranoid
pleonaxiacs covetous
of their neighbour’s need to eat and
live and breathe and breed
in peace as if he had a birthright to
his own regeneration,
one anonymous stem cell of a creative
imagination
that all else follows from of its own
accord like dragonflies
and leaves on the fourth growth trees
and pariahed waters of life.
The dark is supersaturated with the
indolent intemperance
of vulpine rabies about to go pandemic
in a hydrophobic rage
of anti-biospheric spirit enflamed by a
vindictive madness
that will afflict itself on people like
King Omega of the Waning Year
on a terminal ward where desolation
just wants to get it over with.
Didn’t the poet say, enough, or too
much? Desecration
on a crime spree against the laws of
hospitality
toward strangers from the past, rape a
Brazilian bus.
The stars above the yellow riverside
willows coming into leaf
shine more simplistically as the
subtlety of our seeing
is dumbed down by the political
conditioning of watchers
watching the watchers as they hand out
bread and circuses
at a black mass of wafers and
viviparous passions
where every contestant regresses
through the stations of virtual reality
like an anti Eleusinian mystery play
based on classical mycology.
Little tree, little tree, in the Eden
we can’t return to,
you’re a soft-hearted thornapple
cooler than moonlight
flaking like the flesh of silver fish
on a thriving lake
where water preoccupies itself with
being alive.
The wisdom of the return journey’s
deeper innocence
has been irrevocably lost like the
peduncle
in the ensuing phylum, like an empty
lifeboat
that drifted away in the fog of an
unmoored moment.
The morphology of knowledge forms comes
and goes
like a shapeshifter annihilating
positrons
looking for God particles to attribute
mass
to a Standard Model of Universal
Mirages
that can be photo-shopped like a proxy
of God to posterity.
Save me, save me from myself cry the
chicken little prophets
who keep falling on themselves like
skies caving in
to the pressure of laying enough cosmic
eggs to meet
a minimum quota of sunny days to come
inside.
Power, knowledge, wealth, sex, art,
popularity,
Californian encounters with astonishing
gods,
as serial killers return the keys to
the broken washrooms
abused at roadside gas stations by
people passing through
their own digestive tracts, one acidic
pit stop after another,
as the wolves dig up teenage girls
along the Highway of Tears in B.C.
with cyanotically blue fingernails and
mass i.d.
that salves the horror of random
killing with an air
of inevitability, given what some of
them did for a living,
making love because they couldn’t
afford to make war.
The healers are coming up with new
placebos all the time
to keep up with the progress of
advanced diseases of the mind
The death of so many children
fingerpainting in their own blood,
a serious threat to gun rights. Boards
of education,
the Praetorian guard. Day care centers
at the OK corral.
A run on boomslangs and Bushmasters
like Apple i pods,
while everyone sighs trying to milk the
moon of human kindness
for anti-venom to undo the paralysis of
a child’s mass cardiac arrest.
We’ve been shocked to death by the
ferocity
of our own sins of omission trying to
put a cold smile on things
like snow on a dungheap, flowers and
teddy bears
on the stairs of an abattoir that puts
hell with its halberds to shame.
The big fish eat the little fish and
the little fish have to be armed.
Evolution is an arms race that can
trace its ancestral lifelines
like a bush back to the Burgess Shale.
Predatory eyes.
Soft body parts like bleeding hearts in
thicker shells.
Heat seekers and siege minds with the
internet wired
to their skulls like drone masters in
Colorado
with their eye in the sky on the big
picture
of draconian starmaps placing their
zodiacs
under house arrest in zoological
environments
to preserve them from going extinct
before they’re questioned.
O Truman, little haberdasher, you let
Pandora out of the box
like a nuclear foreign policy that
turned the elemental table
against itself like a mad dog biting at
its own ulcerations.
Phaeton took charge of the chariot of
the sun and set fire to the earth.
Shall we take the reins of Charles’
Wain in the bread basket
of the Midwest and plough the dead
under like grain
to renew the half lives of a
genetically modified rebirth
as resistant to blight as Jesus in the
wilderness harrowing hell
as we reverse the spin on our
millenarian myths of origin
and make agriculture the civilized
scapegoat for what we cultivate
in our missile siloes? Cain slew Able
because his sacrifice
wasn’t acceptable and the crow
scratched the earth
like a corporate farmer and said bury
him here like this.
Isn’t it true? Now every time we kill
a plant
we’re hunting ourselves to death like
food?
Greed raised the temperature of the
earth five degrees
when the planet came down with us like
a fever
and Atlantis sank like an oil platform
in the North Sea
all technologically failsafe sailors on
board
like true captains of industry manning
their executive lifeboats
while we’re left clinging like swim
bladders
well over our heads in debt to anything
that floats.
Apocalyptic. Martin Sheen on acid in
the first scene.
Violent mandalas freaking our
punched-out reflections
like spider webs having a nervous
breakdown
someone might lift the veil from our
face
and see once and for all what we’ve
always been,
gravitational eyes shapeshifting empty
space
as if, as it never isn’t, I were
modelling my inspiration, my muse
into a full body life study in the nude
from the inside out
and she had to stand very still in the
rain,
in a thin garment of silence, just as
I’m about
to say her name like a grave at the
back of an orphanage.
PATRICK WHITE
No comments:
Post a Comment