Tuesday, July 16, 2013

MY HEART SCALDED BY THE ACIDS OF THE WORLD

MY HEART SCALDED BY THE ACIDS OF THE WORLD

My heart scalded by the acids of the world,
thorns in my eyes like atrocities of light,
my tears the Rorschach blood spatter
of kids colouring in the chalk outlines
of their corpses on the sidewalks of Chicago.

Outrage grown so high-pitched it’s shrieking in silence
but there isn’t a mirror you can hold up
to human nature that isn’t cracked
like the sound barrier of a voice-box
that can’t believe the shit it’s hearing
out of the mouths of monostomes. Monostomes
eliminate through the same mouths they eat with
like the austerity budgets of the unseemly rich
ingratiated like tapeworms in the body politic.

Ignorant, avariciously vicious bankers, lobbyists,
Taliban North hating in the name of Jesus
anyone who wasn’t baptized white and leprous
in the same creation myth of the gene pool
they’re immersed in like the charred fossils of doves
in the La Brea tarpits of an approaching eclipse,
politicians hard-wired like wooden dummies
to the ventriloquist puppet-masters pulling their strings
like umbilical cords that give women just enough rope
to go moor themselves to their bodies
like aborted lifeboats in an ice storm
of mysogynist legislation that says like Leviathan
to the sea you must bring forth like a public fountain
or hang from your own lifeline like a coathanger
in a meat locker. While the church diddles
little boys in the choir, go tell, Theotokos,
the mother of God, the sea, when the spirit of light
whispers into her ear you shall bear a child,
she must give immaculate birth to the offspring
of rape and incest, open Pandora’s box
or suffer like an honour killing in the name
of a vaginal probe with the spiritual life
of the used condom that miscarried you
like a outhouse into this legislative grotesquerie of life.

What’s it like to be born so obnoxiously powerful you can
desecrate an entire atmosphere with
the very first breath you take on earth?
To spy on worlds within worlds like a Peeping Tom
to compensate for the stunted sex life
of the keyhole you were in highschool
and still get caught violating your own
perverted taboos like an ingenue with a hooker
you copulate with like a medicine bag of snake oil
with an empty wallet that will later flush you out
in a douche of sexually righteous disgust.

Bullets for hummingbirds on the streets of democracy
window dressing the hearse of your lilac principals
with paid mourners of the dead corrupting the laws
you bequeath as a legacy to the living
like the quotas of private prisons you’re in bed with.

Everybody knows you’re giving a bad name to the sluts
that indulge your morbid appetite for body counts.
You really think we’re going to erect a phallic obelisk
to Amun in the temple of Karnak like a black farce
in your honour? I saw you in the senate of Rome
like an oil executive in the food supply. Ever wonder
why Caligula, mad as he was, made the good horse sense
of Incitatus a full consul over you? Leading plague rats
led by the noserings of party politics by elephants and jackasses.

The people know the difference between eagles and turkey-vultures.
The people can tell the difference between a knot
and a tree ring in the depths of their heartwood,
who’s a moonrise and who’s the goatshead
polluting their housewells like a fracking ceo
who wants to privatize the waters of life in their housewells.

The retributive karma of swarming killer bees
will taint the weedless sunshine of your decrescent,
unfertile smile like a Sahara of the same pesticides
that mutated the honey in the hives of the golden rule.
You will walk naked through the flames of hell
like hogsweed throwing acid in your eyes,
like fanatical spitting cobras on the same
radioactive wavelength of illiterate soul you are.
Your cartouche will be effaced like the writing
on the wall you never learned to read like an Afghan schoolgirl
for fear the word of God might liberate her
from the likes of you. The hadith of Muslim and Bukhari
say Muhammad liked prayer, perfume and women the best.
What do you think he’d think of you whether
you were a Christian or a Jew, Shia or Sunni,
reeking like a corpse flower of religion
over the cadavers of everything he cherished?

When the shepherds of the black camel
raise tall buildings in the desert, when no bird
sings in the eucalyptus candelabras of the promised land,
and a Chinese man, the last on earth, grovels
in the dust at his sister’s feet, aren’t those the signs
the Sufi said ushers in the end of the world?
Meet you at Megiddo on the plains of Jezreel.
Array your banners like the political bunting
of the shills for a military-industrial complex
that size our children up for personal landmines
or the god’s-eye of a drone collating potential roadkill
like a sewer of blood along a highway of tears.
Here’s my prophecy. When the food on my plate
is a lie. When the air I breathe is toxic filth.
When the water I drink explodes in my face.
When the earth groans under the deadweight
of paradise in the charnel houses of the killing fields
and the nuclear waste of the afterbirth
of the first fusion bomb is leaking into the watersheds
of Washington State like history being made
retroactively like the half life of plutonium.
When the sea is vulgarized like a garbage dump
as the moon is soon to be and childhood already is.
When the police approach their own species
more and more dressed up like insects
in the toolkits and garb of war and nine civilians
die for every soldier in the field since World War II
and there are no medals handed out for the casualties
killed in the doorways of third world powers
by those who have come to save their hearts and homes
like well-armed cowards who mythically inflate
the courage it takes to initiate a scorched earth policy
in an air-conditioned computer room of apocalyptic vidiots.
All militaries are climax-controlled millenarians
with their finger on the trigger of the Big Bang
like the G-spot on a starmap of sidereal explosions.

When hopelessness is more accurate than faith in life.
When four hundred billion dollars is spent
on an F-35 to feed the political career banks
of insatiable contractors and a bevy of senators
on taxpayer dollars who just excised 80 billion
worth of foodstamps from the cupboards of the poor,
one fifth of the proto-type of an underdeveloped
fighter in the womb with a cleft cockpit for a palette
from an agricultural bill of privileged cronies
civilization is supposed to be based upon
like the latifundia of the homeless masses of Rome,
and twenty five million children a year
starve to death in the retractible wheel wells
of birth and death, misery, ignorance, greed
in a conservative circus of black-hearted clowns
that don’t even hand out bread anymore
to the masses distracted by the puerile views
of celebrity juveniles and senile rockstars
that pimp for the news in the refugee camps of Darfur
like the children of the Visigoths Roman slavers
bought for dogmeat until Alaric sacked the capital
and the Whore of Babylon put on the vestments of the Vatican
to put a holy spin on their self-indulgent sins of omission.

Mum to the subterfuges of virtual reality,
Wall Street screams at Main Street let them eat
genetically modified birthday cake to commemorate
inequality, fratricide, and the slow death of liberty
like a foodchain used to garotte the poor
in a reactionary response to the storming of the Bastille.
History repeats itself like communism and Karl Marx,
the first time as a tragic will to power, the second
as the black farce of free enterprise no one can afford.

The mystery of humankind. The bloodline of war.
One red thread running like a theme through it all,
A beading of skulls, rosaries, prayer-beads,
Kaiser, Caesar, Czar, if history repeats itself
it’s because it’s become a cliche of hell,
that the oppressed die first like shock troops,
cannon fodder, human folderol, in return
for killing their own off in exchange for citizenship
in a cannibal nation founded on a principle
of I eat you, now you eat me by proxy
so I can wash my hands clean of the affair
like a racist snowbank in a heat wave
trickling down the last leg of your esophogeal gutter
like an economic theory on a fire-hydrant,
as I said earlier, monostomatically, trying
to keep it together as it melts away
like an ice-cream cone toppled in the dirt
doesn’t it, as the ants, o do you see the ants coming,
millions of little jaws like colonies of tribal migrants,
the Cimri, the Goths, the Quadi, the Marcomanni,
the huddled masses, the oppressed, the poor,
as it was in Rome when their wealth began to rot
in the nostrils of the have-nots, coming
to sop you up like a dessert that will fall off its sceptre
when the inevitable garbage can lid comes off
and the rich turn holy, rendering unto Caesar
that which is Caesar’s as the state reverts
to a mercenary church for Byzantine corporations.

When the measure of a nation is the size of its cemeteries.
When human nature pulls itself up
like the lungs of its bloodroots in the Amazon
as if the fruits by which it was once known by
were no longer necessary as the nuts and berries
of why we’re here, and the healing powers
of the stars and the flowers no longer thrill us
with the loveliness of the way they cure our ills
and there’s an appetite for desecration in our wonder,
a restless ingratitude in our attitude toward life,
less mystery in the things we dream of,
more self-destructiveness than risk in the chances
we take to avoid ourselves like the words
that leave us speechless as the mouth harp
of a hyoid bone that’s run out of things to raise
the genomes of our mitochondrial mother tongues
up the stars in praise, in horror, in love,
in abysmal devotion to the future of becoming,
less the undertaker in the garden disinterring
our remains to ascertain if it were suicide or murder,
and more about the gardener in the undertaker
germinating unmodified seed metaphors
on the windowsills of our magnificent solitude
that will root like white and dark matter
in all available dimensions of the mindspace before us
as if we were all quantumly entangled like wild grapevines
in drinking the waters of life from our own prophetic skulls
and tasting the wine of our own starmud
like the mystic vintners of the light and the rain
in the eyes of the unfathomable nights
the sun shines at midnight, unaccountable as the stars,
to ripen the darkness in everyone’s flesh and blood.


PATRICK WHITE

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