I COULD SAY NOTHING

I COULD SAY NOTHING

I could say nothing. Or I could exert my imagination

to say the way it never is, nothing but exceptions

working to rule, functional disparities between chaos

and clarified thought, the dream grammars

of magicians on the nightwatch asleep on the job.

It’s a polymorphous perverse multiverse

that will take any neo-gestural suggestion

as seriously as a potter shapes the emptiness

of the urn he’s making for himself on the wheel

of birth and death, his hands caked in starmud

that comes with its own kiln baked into the mix.

I could say nothing about the lack of an inexplicable reason

for why it is the way it is and return to my ignorance

by default like a solar prominence lashing out

into the dark as if it were scourging the softness

in the eyes of the upper atmosphere almost in tears

for the way it rants at a planet determined to see for itself.

I could busy myself, soul-searching for words

the silver-tongued Russian olives might risk

whispering into the ears of the willows still in their gowns.

I could mine the crude ore of the asteroids and turn

the motherlode into subtler refinements of the mind,

as the soothsayers of greed have foretold

like an oracular app on their stealth cellphones.

I wouldn’t be alone in this, with all

these affable spy satellites and drones for familiars

keeping watch on what I write about the breadlines

outside the surrealistic circuses that distract us

with the infinite variety of living like people

with no choice but to be consoled by the private rights

of wild animals shocked into performing

for a ringmaster with a whip and a footstool

to keep the savagery of our rage from getting out of hand.

Or something disgustingly cute to take us off the ball

we’re losing our balance on, keeping in mind

inside every sentimentalist is a nasty brute.

Trying to seed a sea change with bullets in an exchange

of gunfire is the forget the immaculate conception

this sea of precarious awareness first had of us

when it breathed light into the waters of life

like moonset into the barrier reefs of the sponges

and corals that engendered us to live outside the law

as if we were honest with ourselves. First impressions

shall be the last, and the last shall be the worst of them all.

If people don’t concentrate enough to lose their focus

in someone they love anymore, the rest is fate, and we

just dissipate back into the void like a passing thought

or the one way tickets of Monarch butterflies on the way home

like illegal aliens estranged by the toxicity of our pestilential

presidential run-offs as we research how to musically embrace

extra-terrestrials in a bond of cowering friendship to feel

we’re not alone in the world, except together with each other,

where it isn’t familiarity that breeds contempt,

but the encylopedic holy books of our hatred we keep

preaching to the choir like voice coaches and spinny healers

laundering the bedsheets in a cult hospital of blood-stained angels

racially profiling the stranger at the gate

as if his shadow fell any darker on the earth than ours

in the doorway of a house on fire torched by a burning cross.

Dry ice for tears, people don’t cry for each other anymore,

they evaporate spiritually, they sublimate, they sigh

for a better world than this worst of an infinite number

of better alternatives as they arm their innocence

like a children’s crusade on the way to another holy war.

Is it feasible any image we were created in the name of

to love one another is as rabidly addled as the memes

we follow like Ibn Attar’s pilgrimage of birds

to look into any god’s eyes and see ourselves

in a parliament of corrupt politicians padding their travel-fares

as they do their bodies, egos and hairdos at public expense?

When hasn’t the death hex of the military industrial complex

not been a blessing in disguise to the corporate undertakers

who wash the corpses for burial like sins off their hands.

Offices of great state enshrining human rights on the Vietnam Wall.

Dividing, we rule. Together, like the old woman

who unwound her spinal cord into a million weak threads

as if she were sorting out the bloodlines of xylem and phloem

in the heartwood of the tree of humankind, we open

a school of assassins to preemptively protect the golden rule

with concealed weapons against the genocidal madmen

who secretly feel, by killing children indiscriminately,

they’re pschoBabylonically on the road to becoming one of us.

PATRICK WHITE