DECAY INTO MADNESS

DECAY INTO MADNESS

Decay into madness like the Kaisers and Rasputins

just before World War 1 when life hemorrhaged

like heavy red velvet curtains and we all bled to death

in a sterling defence of the roses, putting thorns on our helmets

and death in our beds as if war were a mistress

you could make uninhibited love to when beauty bored you.

Life ripped under its own weight, too many refugees

caught up in the spiderwebs that couldn’t sustain the pretence

they were dreamcatchers and safety nets, trampolines

and suspension bridges for the rolling barrage

of rhetorical clowns that fired their mouths off like cannon

into an abyss without a prophylactic suicide net on the Peace Tower

you could haul into the lifeboat like a fisher of men.

Violations too deep for scar tissue in the trenches.

I reread T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land recently

and it smelled of chlorine and mustard gas, the sickly pallor

of waterlilies rotting in a methane swamp of starmud.

Five petals opened like the plinths of Rigel in Orion

and one flower bloomed like a jester’s cap.

Now everybody feels like the butt of the joke

at the expense of their own enlightenment.

Bilious as a dying fall without a gas mask on,

death goes to a ghoulish ball in unmasked Venice.

Enfeebled, dissolute, nauseous, the soul,

and the flesh made out of silly putty

as Michelangelo studies plastic surgery

and everybody knows what an extortion racket it is

to live like a debt to society elected loansharks

are coming to collect or repeal your place at the trough,

repossess your face, say repeat after me

enough is never enough. Gluttony fattens on need.

Ask any corporate cannibal hunger isn’t just the desire

to eat. It’s the power to eat the eyes right out

of the spirit of a human in front of the mirror

it answers to like the prey of maggots and tapeworms.

The truth gets simpler as the lies grow more complex.

People so numb they’re living by reflex and when

the lobbyists and pimps of advertising say jump

the politicians twitch like Giovanni’s frog. Not Basho’s.

And the parrot pundit quasi profiteering

celebrity intellectuals who extemporize

like Hamlet in the paralytic shadows of tragic issues

and blame-game atrocities that once were

unaccounted for like yesterday’s children

until newsworthy expedience found a new way

of burying their embarrassing corpses in greater contexts

that could no longer be of concern to their dolls

and teddy bears now they’re all dead. What are

you going to do now, smart guy, sew the buttons

back on their eyes? See if you can open their eyelids

by tilting the world on its axis like a lance

about to take another stab at slaying a windmill?

Surrealistic black farce of evil clowns in a morality play

where no one who deserves it ever gets their own.

The mindstream runs down like a waterclock

into gutters and sewers, the Via Cloacum of the overfed

who will be slaughtered like pigs on their own altars

tomorrow, given the way things are always taking

a turn toward their reverse like the polymorphous perverse

with an ingenuous genius for acute irony when your head’s

piked like the spearhead of a project on the suburban gateway

of your artificial paradise and your astro-turf golfclub

and you look for all the world like an olive on a toothpick

stuffed with scarlet pimento someone set aside

like a mere formality of history defacing the image

you had of yourself as if you’d been patched

by an outlaw biker club who had your back, but not

the unprophetic skull of your spectacularly shrunken head.

That said, if you don’t use it as an excuse to wait with the dead,

things are going to get better as long as the river runs

like a mindstream clarifying itself like a window in tears

when it rains as if your eyes were being whipped

but you’re inside, safe somewhere like an act

that just came off the road, and it feels as if

you were being scourged by a single blade

of first magnitude stargrass punking the fireworks

of the blank look in the fathomless eyes of a merciful starmap

that condemns the house of life like a zodiac for demolition

and then says, ok space cadets, show me the blueprints

of the constellations where you’d like to live now.

And don’t be dismayed into suicide by the blackest night

of your imagination. That’s your own aniconic

creative freedom staring you back in the face

searching the watershed in your eyes out like an abyss

for any sign of a new creation myth to let it know

as dark out as it is now, yes, your tear ducts are blocked

by tiger mussels in the Great Lakes, but I can see

your light from here. O, definitely, it’s you,

and you’re still shining like a new universe

out of the void into the dark abundance, bright vacancy

of the available dimensions of an incommensurable

future memory of every breath you take to creatively exhilarate

the flames of your starmud flowering in a mindscape

you have yet to name like an Ojibway elder the spirit of a child.

PATRICK WHITE