BORN INTO POVERTY AND HUMILIATION

BORN INTO POVERTY AND HUMILIATION

Born into poverty and humiliation and the degradation

of a woman at the hands of a man who said he once loved her,

had to have her for the world, begged and pleaded,

achieved her and then tried to put her out like a dance step

he was learning to do with a cigarette-butt in the dirt.

Not a humiliation of mine, not a degradation of me

I didn’t have the rage and discipline to overcome,

but the boyish impotence of watching her suffer

day after day, the occlusion of the light and human warmth

she was to four frightened children who were witness

to their black out father’s swarming drunks

when he got out of jail like a hive of killer bees

and she were too isolated and hurt to keep

anything back from me, the eldest, her sounding post,

who couldn’t do anything to help her except

pray to an unforgiving god to let him grow up in time

to murder his father while he was still conscious enough

to feel the bright steel of a son’s sterling blood

shuck the flint knapped oyster of his heart

to see if there were ever a pearl inside I could pluck out

like the evil eye of a mad moonrise on another binge.

As my mother withdrew like an ice age into herself

I tried to decipher her tears like unbroken circles of rain

in the heartwood of a young boy’s smashed guitar.

A strawberry heart with the savage scar of the moon

across the bass string of her throat like a martyr

garotted by what she had to go through to survive

her own life with four kids she controlled like the damage

done by love on the rampage that had trampled them.

I’m not a Momma’s boy. She didn’t cling to my brother

and I like an umbilical cord on a burning box kite

and we took more than our quota of self-destructive

chances in the world to prove to ourselves we might yet

outgrow the stigma of being men in the image of our father.

And the rough-hewn diamonds in my two sister’s eyes,

as well as my mother’s intransigent independence

to sacrificially transcend her circumstances at all costs,

long before the feminist revolution, I took it for granted,

all women who had grown up poor were as liberated

as the life-nurturing events of underwater volcanoes

breast feeding the ocean like islands of drowned sailors

that had smashed against the rocks of their seafaring wills.

Viking mermaids in bobbi-sox and saddle shoes

who sang alluringly to their vagrant boyfriends

they weren’t amused by the course they had set for themselves

by relying on their starmaps like mythically inflated safety nets

as they lowered the Titanic like a lifeboat on the moon

they inherited from their parents like shipwrights in drydock.

Pull yourself up out of poverty by your bootstraps, Paddy.

Get an education. And I thought, why was that? No one

going to lower the bucket to help pull me out of the birth canal

I fell into like the wrong housewell? And I did. Amo, amas, amat,

amamus, amatis, amant. I was taught civilization owed

everything it stole from the poor to agriculture,

and ruining a few wolves by turning them into sheep-dogs.

Animal husbandry that culls the people like roadkill.

I don’t think that anymore. My teachers were the dupes

of the lie they benignly bought into to keep their jobs.

Civilization, government, law, education, economics,

no more than the pine-scented deodorant the rich use

to disguise the blood musk of the abattoirs

slowly butchering the poor emotionally, creatively,

imaginatively as a kind of collateral damage

like torn beavers, wrecked muskrats, meaty groundhogs

water-logged in a ditch the turkey-vultures administer

like bankers and undertakers eating the guts out of

as the rich pass by every summer casually on their way

to the vacation cottage that will enable them

to get back to nature, ravening on the fat of the poor

like the American dream or whatever passes for one

in Canada from the floor of the House of Commons.

The rich sustain their vision of a good life like ants

eating the eyes out of the heads on the soft shoulders

of a way of life that has made them arrogant, stupid

and extinctually feeble. You know what civilization is

when you boil the fat out of chaos, it’s a deodorant

for the rich and powerful, corrupt, hateful, and mendacious

to smell like herbivores instead of overseas bloodbanks

that stain their teeth and lips red in claw and fang

like a dowdy, middle-aged political rose smearing

thick lipstick like dubbin on her waterproof mouth

she’s lies through as if life were a strawberry milkshake

she’s sucking the bubbles of the bottom up

through the proboscis of a straw longer than the budget

she proposes to make everyone else but her go first?

I studied history at university. The filthy rich

and their inconsequential bloodlines like varicose veins

that have grown stiff with the plack of their porky progeny

killing the poor of one country off against another

then flying like Churchill to Poland to sit down with Stalin

to see who gets to imperialize the cadavers

in the boneyards of Europe behind Roosevelt’s back,

because the U.S. is still too much of an ingenue

to know how to use a secret police force effectually

over port and cigars to keep a strangle hold on the people

they hang from meat hooks like abstract eviscerations

of foreign policy, as if flesh and blood had nothing to do with it.

Look at their bodies scotched by overindulgence

and privilege, see them naked at a photo-op

squealing like pigs at a trough living in their own shit

as Napoleon said of Talleyrand like excrement

in a silk stocking. Imagine history sitting on a toilet

listening to the vital organs of an overfed sea cow

like a trickle down theory of economics claiming

as it breaks like a political wind in an executive bathroom,

it can eat your food for you as a way of filling your empty bellies

with the crumbs and fins of the loaves and fishes

it feeds on as if it eliminates through the same bung hole

of a mouth it feasts with. Monostomes. Look it up.

Who hasn’t compiled a secret hit list of black ops

to be meted out contractually like an apocalyptic mode

of creative street justice for the atrocities they had to swallow

like bad medicine in an age of nuclear miracles

where the rich eat pearls and gold to avoid the black plague

of the fleas that docked their yachts in Genoa, or Cape Cod,

to teach Europe first and now North America

to the chagrin of the McCarthyite clones of Ted Cruz

and the feudal Republicans, death is an equal opportunity Democrat

that treats everyone fairly without distinction

like a plague rat chewing through the morgues of Congress?

Imagine that. The high and mighty brought low

by a little bug the NSA didn’t plant in the name

of the panic button on homeland security

genetically modifying the collective unconscious of the mob

like the super id of Monsanto in a cornfield of dreams

killing the bees and the Monarch butterflies with neonicotinoids

as surely as the Germans used Zyklon B at Auschwitz

or Assad fumigated the suburbs of Damascus with sarin gas.

Whatever direction the wind blows, World War I

all over again. Rumsfeld peddling mustard gas

and the dragonfly helicopters to deliver it to Baghdad

against the Iranians and the Kurds like cologne to a dictator

with sons more subordinately vicious than their old man

smiling like a Pacific dawn on the smog of Los Angeles.

And don’t tell me the terrorists don’t roam in packs

of rabid pit bulls tearing a child on her way to school apart.

Or the profiteering capitalists in the black markets

of the wars they start don’t think the poor are the reason

they suffer, and don’t take anyone’s pain to heart but their own.

Or the poor themselves don’t eat their own when

there’s nothing else in the house of life to chew on

but the gummy cliches of the snake-oil politicians

selling them the artificial fangs of yesterday’s vampires

as if everyone were entitled to a bloodbank of their own

as an antidote to the poisons they ingest like their daily bread.

Looking for a happy ending to the black farce

of the life you’re living? Who can blame you? I don’t.

Every little piggy’s got to get its own, every dog,

its bone, only so much time and then forever and forever

and forever, nothing to look forward to, nothing

behind you to look too kindly upon. Nothing but

a waterclock of empty moments to preoccupy you

with how minisculely irrelevant everything is at a distance

that disappears into itself like a blackhole

nothing can get out of, the bones of star-nosed moles

buried alive like tubers that groped the dark

with the green tentacles of their eyes awhile

and then withered like used condoms that have the feel

of the skin of old men in a wet dream. Life peaks

like an amoeba on a mountaintop, fish in the sky

out of their heights, a few astronauts like dust

on a starmap, lies that binge in the mouths

of corrupt politicians crying big slow tears

of crocodile saliva for the victims of their hydrophobia.

I wish I had a dad in the grave I could lay flowers upon

and talk to in the intimacy of the eternal silence

like a son that went fishing with his lighthouse of a father

and got lost at sea on the moon as my mother

called out to us from the far shore like a foghorn into

the forlorn dampness of an impending echo in the air

of a recurring nightmare that ended with a dove descending

as if somebody cared enough to return the message.

Three bells and all’s well. Or straight from the heart

of Julian of Norwich, all shall be well, all shall be well,

and all manner of things shall be well. Instead of this hell

that, too, shall pass. Like a kidney stone we pissed out

like a diamond in the rough. Like the ostrakon of an asteroid

with our name on it coming at us like a right cross

to the jawbone of the asses braying like pundits on tv

as if this were Periclean Athens, spinning fables

of oracular equality at the beginning of democracy

for those of the citizenry rich enough to be free,

and for the rest of the mob, the afterbirth of what’s left.

Optimistic autopsies chalked like flow charts

on the godforsaken sidewalks of the stillborn.

PATRICK WHITE