LIFE'S A SLOPPY BUSINESS, DAUGHTER

LIFE’S A SLOPPY BUSINESS, DAUGHTER

Life’s a sloppy business, daughter. You

average out the crucials, adjust your motives to the stars

that have been tinkering with you since childbirth,

flutter your eyelashes like butterflies over the ruins

of last year’s flowers as if you were dropping pamphlets

over a subjugate nation, exhorting the weeds to ideals

promoting horrid compromises with common sense

and the general viciousness of the world embodied

in the dispassionate vengeance of corporate profit margins

to deny a foreign national four year old girl

whose amateurism still trusts people’s eyes

food, medicine, school, water, rights to the rain

freedom from from life as a silk worm

in a garment factory run by the most loathesome of men

in the finest clothes economic slavery’s got to offer

as if you could wash the sewer of a soul off

in a shower of gold that gilds you like a maggot

in an Armani suit, or a political tapeworm elected to public office

to feed off the poor as if it were for their own good,

to promote prosperity in a graveyard with mineral rights

to your bones. A Via Cloacum of dry-eyed evil in the world

emptying into a dead sea of consciousness like the swill

of trivialized krill, the bread and circuses

of engineered distractions with sunshades unfolded

like the parasols of the Roman navy as the gutted mob

gluts on the entrails of victims unluckier than they were

when the wasp came to lay its egg on their forehead

and eat them less engagingly from the inside out like worms

in their eyes and their hearts. O savage evolution

I won’t smear sparkles on the eyelids of the dead

you desecrate like the flesh of your own flesh

to get on with life like an imperial starmap of client constellations.

I suppose I should be offering you more rounded wisdom

than this thornapple of insight into inhuman nature,

more of a sweet-natured sunset than this nasty false dawn

where every new beginning by acclamation means

the death of sentience in someone else, by the millions

throughout history, where the truth is always deeply indebted

to the ingratiating co-sponsors of the capitulant facts.

But I abhor sloughing the suffering of the world off

like a soft, old man whose eyelids have wrinkled

like the withered skin of daylilies, who’d rather

blur and blunt his vision of life like broken glass

sand-blasted in the gentrifying tides of sea stars

he doesn’t want to cut his feet on firewalking the Road of Ghosts.

I’m repulsed by the geriatric deathmasks of strategic kindness

defrauding their own wisdom like a gnostic gospel of cataracts

in their eyes, mystic flowers in the sky, buffing the toxicity

of the crescents of the moon, because the bad fang fell out

and the only one they’ve got left they’re trying to pass off,

sensing they’re too weak to hurt anyone anymore,

as anti-venom to the same kind of people they’ve been

biting all their life for their place at the table above the salt

in a snakepit cannibalizing their wavelengths like black holes

harmonizing with the music of their uninhabitable celestial spheres

attuned to their own background universal hiss. Frog-swallowers

and nest-robbers trying to bury their thorns like

the hands of a clock in the foliage of roses that smell

like the embroidered pillowcases they no longer dream on.

Dozy, rosey, barnboard frames, picturing the punk and pulp

of rotten heartwood trying to rinse the bathtub rings

the rain left like the sediment of a dry creekbed

running through their veins like cracked starmud

waiting for a flashflood of the shining waters of life

to lower their blood pressure like the first

heart attack of the spring to wake the toads up from hibernation.

What travesties of human excellence I’ve witnessed

in the hearts of men and women who settled for less

than the lives they’ve been given to live randomly

out of the blue, blue sky like an accidental gift

of inestimable value they kept appraising like fool’s gold

by the light of a full moon that never came to harvest.

The mind is an artist and it is able to paint the worlds

with great skill and subtle hues of technical cunning

that can transform the opacity of the solid

into the myriad translucencies of the unimaginably real.

But, remember, you’re whole life’s nothing

but a portrait you’re working on from the inside.

A solitary figure in a mindscape listening

to the picture-music of a dream grammar

that keeps shape-shifting like the palette of a voice

trying to catch the atmospherics of whatever mirage

you’re rendering in the watercolours of your tears at the time

before the light in your heart changes and your bones

are laid in a grave like the field easel you’ve

been packing around with you all your life

like the stick people you drew in childhood.

Make an art of them. A masterpiece of heart,

eye, hand, and mind. Flesh the world out

in your own humanity and cherish it like a life study

you modelled for yourself in the mirror you peered into

without turning to stone at what you saw

or asking who’s the most beautiful of all,

but remaining true to your own eyes

like the creative bounty of a nightsky

whatever uplifts, whatever befalls your starmud

like the nocturnal waterlilies of the Pleiades in a low place,

or that whisper of heretical silence in the heart

that resonates throughout the whole of space

like the curse and the blessing of a habitable planet

bound to the stake of a star for remembering what it is

to be indefensibly radical about remaining compassionately human.

PATRICK WHITE