SICKENED BY THE SUPPURATING WOUNDS OF THE AILING WORLD

SICKENED BY THE SUPPURATING WOUNDS OF THE AILING WORLD

Sickened by the suppurating wounds of the ailing world

attended by political maggots who swear they’ll

eat the corruption out of the system, all of it, except

their own shit. Monostomes. They eat with the same mouth

they enter with, and exit like toilet bowls. Politics

with Lyme disease, dusky yellow sunsets in the green dragon blood

of wisdom they’ve amputated the limbs off like a tree

that got in the way of their powerlines. If it’s green,

it’s gangrenous. Barracuda chainsaws snarling

in an old growth forest that’s already been crucified

by the nails of the protesters as Caesar renders unto Caesar

that which is Caesar’s and no one else’s forever and ever amen.

Listened for a pulse in the voices of the corporate poets

long enough and realized the prizes go to echoes of voices

that sing like lobbyists on behalf of their own egos,

in music, in painting, in science, in life and death,

cannibalistic viciousness like thousands of pigs at a trough

talking like an antiseptic mouthwash to sweeten the stink

of old meat on their breath like the carrion of crocodiles.

Go, little rainbow, and find some oilslick to lie down upon

you can enlighten like an auroral tattoo of a butterfly

on the scales of a rat’s snake’s skin. Too much Ariel

and you’ll suffer the karmic revenge of Caliban

in that one big eye in the sky of your Cyclopean

approach to the brutal vicissitudes of life that kiss

the innocent good night on their foreheads, good night like

wasps laying their eggs on the living host

of tomorrow’s diminishing Swallowtails and Monarchs

imbibing neonicotinoids from the fracked housewells

of the flowers. I’ll look for you on pills in suburbia

o, sometime later, when you’re retaining water

like a bored soccer mom in the second phase of the tripartite moon.

I’ll look into your one good eye and I’ll know

without you saying a word, how creatively numb

you had to become to litter the sunny side of the street

with the glitter of rainbows on the wings of infectious houseflies.

The mutants, the ghouls, the grotesque, the gluttony

of the ignorant trying to die with the most toys

in their war chest to address the hosts of their victims

as winners among the victorious ghost writers

who revise history to exonerate the complicit parts

they played in it like sophists of the heart in an abattoir---

the mutants have taken devolution too far for things

to ever change except for the chthonic outrage

of a habitable planet shocked at the damage done

by guests in the house of life it provided for them

out of its own inner resources and a little help from the Leonids.

Anything goes to amuse the mob with its own insanity.

Bread and circuses, foodstamps and the Olympics

to tear down the slums of the poor to fill the hotels

of the mercantile cartels of tropical Sochi. But not to worry,

Darwin said the nations of the big fish eat

the nations of the little fish like krill

strained like bleeding blackberries

through the baleen of bottom feeding blue whales,

and the little fish have to be athletic. Exceed the record

or perish in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro.

Even a loser who upholds the myth of regressive development

by trying as hard as an Algerian immigrant in Paris

to make a living that wouldn’t make his family ashamed of him,

can win a place of affection in the hearts,

if not the hall of fame, by echoing the same defections

in the heartlessness of the audience that applauds him

like a little guy trying so hard against the odds

of the debilities they’ve imposed upon him, they

almost remember what it was like to cry for themselves sincerely.

And here comes the press, the fourth estate, engaged

in checking and balancing the lies of the other three

as a safeguard on democracy like celebrity paparazzi

salaciously whimpering platitudes over a newsworthy corpse

they’re interviewing like blackflies on live tv. Why not

talk directly to the guys who own the freedom to speak

like the stem cells of their iphones cloned as

the Wizard of Oz making a big noise about nothing

behind the mythically inflated misquotes of mosquitoes

humming in their ears behind the story like bloodbanks

at the beginning of a food chain with the logos

of peacocks, third eyes, alphabets, and bare initials

carved into the bark of compromised lovers

who forgot what their names were for a long time ago.

Sick of it. Not ill. Sick. Like a fish swimming

in the polluted waters of life at the infectious stage

of a nuclear reactor throwing plague rats into the watersheds

of water being life, life being water if you’ve ever watched

the flowing comets of goldfish in an aquarium late at night for long.

Sick of the strong stepping on the throats of the weak

like snapping turtles at the jugulars of wild swans.

Sick of the asylum, the hospital, the drugstore, the funeral home

the old and disabled retire to when their benefits are cut off

like neurons from hydro, their redoubtable wisdom

unable to keep up with the payments on technology.

Sick of the bumper crops of pharmaceuticals threshed

like genetically modified grains of wheat when the moon is full

and the emergency wards are howling like extracurricular ambulances

they put on in Montreal like banshees at a harvest barn dance

and the violins are shrieking like hysterical crackheads

for more drugs to put them out of their misery

like the mercy of administrative angels on the psych ward.

Someone should publish a dream grammar for the sacred syllables

of our mother tongues raging like offended flower vendors

in the shadows of the Tower of Babel and market it

to the tourists so they don’t get burnt buying a rose

with more thorns than petals in the souk before

the bomb goes off like house nails reroofing

the leak in the shelter of the Lord like the meteor showers

and lightning strikes at the children of Sodom and Gomorrah

who don’t have a chance of growing up to be

a mahdi, a messiah, a hidden imam, exilic patriarchs

commanding all foreign wives be put aside,

a purging of brides heuristically unchosen by a choosey God

as a template for problem-solving extemporaneous

marital affairs. Who dares rend asunder what love

has joined together? The weld is stronger than the original bond.

As the alloys that transgress the limits of the pure element

usually take a sharper edge honed on the wheel of birth and death

than the copper chisels blunted on the pyramids,

dead, dead, dead, innocent and green as moldy bread.

Sick of the disappointments and diminishments

of my humanity. Sicker still of the cloying nostalgia

for what it used to be when the heart was a cause celebre

and not the passing effect of some random circumstance

massed against me like a god particle or birth defect

that’s difficult to detect. I’m here. Where are you?

Not cool, o no, to be disowned by the guildhalls

and literary cults with their unaffordable sentiments

trying to raise awareness of their trivialized art

like the icons and memes of quasi revolutionary saints

parading through Red Square as if life were just

one big chequered table cloth spread out on a sunny spot

in the grass that isn’t as green as it used to be

before they started making the homeless pick up

their own corpses as if they were fouling the foot path.

Not a good space, not pleasantly germaine

to the comas of taste flower-arranging chaos

to go with the urn on the mantle, still too hot to handle,

though it’s beginning to flatline like a dragon that’s flown the coup

or a phoenix in an aviary that sings as if it caught the croupe

from a nightingale with a crown of thorns for a larynx.

Sick of living in a shallow time, in a car pool of shore-huggers

who believe it’s enough to shed a tear or two

to claim they, too, were washed ashore like piratical survivors

who braved the perfect storms on the great night seas

of sorrow and awareness. Sometimes I’ve just got

to get the abyss out of the universe deep inside,

lance the abscess, trepan the prophetic pressure

of the dying planet of my uninhabitable skull

with all its shepherd moons volcanically, expurgate

the ambergris of a sperm whale like a more honest

fragrance of perfume, stick my finger down my throat

like a vomitorium in a Colosseum where

roses of blood in the dirt are being pruned

and tied back like the tree in the moon by

dead head gardeners in a high-walled abbatoir

fascinated by the avant garde aesthetics of blood spatter.

Got to get it out like the Oxyrhyncus sayings

of Jesus Christ, or the Freudian dowagers

of sex-crazed Vienna at the end of a neurotic empire,

or the thorn of the moon in my third eye

I gouged out like the semi precious stone

of a planet embedded in its orbit like an electron

or an engagement ring leftover from an ancient love affair

so as not to be destroyed by what I don’t bring forth.

Out, out, through the emergency exit door

of my therapeutic puncture wound, sick of living

in a shallow time where what’s written off

as the effluvium of the heart in the ditches of inspiration

reeks more sincerely of human content, than what

the mouthwashes and famous deodorants are writing about

as if the stink of enlightenment were the wise

passing cosmic gas just enough to inspire a jackass

to bray like a book with a carrot in front of its nose

that grows like lies in the heartwood of Pinnochio’s.

When your imagination has so little to reveal to you

why try to expose it as if it were real by acclamation?

PATRICK WHITE