AND WHEN WE WAKE

AND WHEN WE WAKE

And when we wake we live the lives

we exiled from our dreams. We enter

the wilderness in the hourglass we drive

our scapegoats into like a dumping ground

for the waste disposal of our infectious sins.

Cleansed of our inner incense and soot

in the unlucky month of May. Poor bears,

poor squirrels, poor scapegoats, poor brides,

o hypocrites, munifikun, purged

by a ritual bath in the saline waters

of our own eyes, I ask you with bitterness and irony

without malice, is our innocence not contagious?

Time demonizes whatever we separate

from ourselves, set aside, cast out, anathematize,

consign to the lost animal shelter, or imprison

in the spirit as if the spirit were some kind of warden

that didn’t have to wear socks over his boots

when he made the night rounds so as

not to wake the cons recasting their nightmares

in bronze like rodeo clowns on rocking horses

before the Trojan gates. Especially in love

we make gifts of the unknown to each other.

Could be a curse, could be a blessing, whoever

knows?---you take it in, you’re betrayed;

you don’t, the fragrant indifference of your piety

fouls the nostrils of God, as she turns away from you

like sundials and wildflowers away from the sun.

The scapegoat learns to live with himself

like the dark familiar of a Renaissance demon

tragically condemned to practice the occult art

of an infernal kind of compassion in the world

that transcends the absolutes of anyone’s condition,

despite the self they have to keep on shedding

like snakes and dragonflies or last spring’s

tree ring in your heartwood to keep on growing,

the death masks of the screening myths

you see in the mirrors your eyes gather into

like sacred pools of tears unveiled like the rain

every time you pass by, estranged from yourself

as if everything crucially vital about this momentary life,

all the terrors and wonders of this mystery

we’ve been dreaming like a waterclock, afterlife

after afterlife, had been reduced, o how could we

have impoverished ourselves so?-- to getting on

with yesterday like the hidden agendas

of busy, busy undertakers washing the starmud

off our corpses for cremation like felled trees

so we can die like fireflies instead of real dragons

with ashes on our breath like a urn full of stars.

O how feeble we’ve become that we have to lean

on all these wise men like crutches we won’t

cast away to do our time standing up on our own

burning ladders of serpent fire climbing our spine

like scarlet runners, to lead us to our mangers,

like public beds in the shelters for the homeless

or the barred cribs of our privatized jail cells.

No winners, no losers, no villains, no heroes,

in truth, it’s hard to tell the victims from

the executioners, given they both wear

a hood over their eyes, and the one isn’t

a new moon and the other an eclipse, both bonded

by the isolation of life on death row

as the curtain parts on the last act of the play

we’re putting on as someone turns down the lights

on the swan song of the full moon in a tar pit

to console the tragically purged witnesses

something infernally compassionate was served by our death.

Call it fate, justice, karma, see it as a morality play

or the absurd theatre of life with no emergency exits

for the actors or the audience, because

as Mephistopheles said to Faustus when he asked

as if knowing would make any difference to anything,

ah, Faustus, why this is hell (can you hear the weary sadness

of the compassion in his voice?) nor we out of it.

And look at us now trying to genetically modify the doctor

in order to cure the disease we’ve afflicted upon ourselves

as if we mythically deflated what’s truly beatific about us

into the candling shadows of pharmaceutical elves

with gargantuan inferiority complexes in the collective unconscious

of a time---was there ever a time?---when the angels

mated with the daughters of men? Silly question,

when it’s as clear as the windows of an orphanage

on Heartbreak Hill, we’re the illegitimate children

of now, not designated heirs among the children of then.

Is there ever going to come a day when we’re

disappointed by the disappointments we are to ourselves

we live every moment of our lives, barring

a few fools who think the way to enlightenment

is just a matter of prying your eyelids open with a crowbar,

like an ox-eyed daisy before its time to bloom,

shucking the shell for the sacred syllable

of the black pearl on its tongue like a fee

for the ferryman with his hands on the wheel

of a deathboat lowered into the waters of life

as if our only hope of rescue were oblivion.

Nada. Nada. Nada. In a sunamic Shangrila of dopamines?

Even if you find yourself shaking like a persecution complex

from withdrawal in the bitter dawn

of your tragically flawed impotence

as you watch the spy satellites transit zenith

in everyone’s telescopic eyes, and there’s a circus

in town but no one’s laughing at the pie-bald clowns

like interventionists in disguise, why labour

like an Oxycontin to yoke your gazelles of light

to that apocalyptic deathcart you drag around with you

like an implausible loss of heart in what

you’re doing to yourself bleating like a judas-goat

on a food chain for a morsel from the mouth

of a tiger of wrath you’re hunting like a perfume in heat?

If you’re living in expectation of never

being understood by anyone, maybe you’re

a star ahead of us and the light’s just a little late

in getting to the rest of us, or you’re sorely

underestimating the innate intelligence of your solitude

to make a fool of you by insisting everybody

mistake you real seriously for the mystic missing link

that’s come to help us all like a starting pistol

in a firing squad a legend ahead of your time

to fill in the blanks with our last names first

and you with your flashflood of a vocabulary,

surfing your own thought waves and then announcing

as if you were confessing something wonderful,

a new blues riff to the lamentable nightbirds

you patronize with compassion for their lack of range:

I know you all like secret passwords you only

use once, then throw away. Though, of course, you don’t.

But that’s ok. The nightmares only lie to people

that nothing can change, and that were

the strangest thing about them. Their stem cells

were never irreparably deranged by their metaphoric selves

when even the inner potential of hell has evolved

into a funeral bell that never rings true until it tolls for you.

PATRICK WHITE