DON'T WANT TO THINK ABOUT THE WORLD FOR AWHILE

DON’T WANT TO THINK ABOUT THE WORLD FOR AWHILE

Don’t want to think about the world for awhile.

Humans are insane. Psychopathically intelligent

monkeys inflicting as much pain upon one another

in their camouflage and white collars as it takes

to overthrow or retain the status quo. The big fish

eat the little fish and the little fish have to comply.

Too isolated by the lightyears I’ve journeyed

deep as my shining will take me into the dark

to care whether I’ll go supernova or not,

everything’s been vaporized in the mythic inflation

of a red giant coming to the end of its life.

Humanity’s easy enough to love microscopically,

up close and intimate, near as friendship,

lovers, flesh and blood, a kiss on the eyelid,

touchable lips at our fingertips like envelopes

to the soul as if there were a loveletter inside.

Macroscopically, too, given we die and dissipate

in common with species we depreciate because

they’re not as smart as we are. Rue the bodycount.

We bury older and fitter corpses than we used to.

And even our sorrows glitter with perversity

more than ever for their entertainment value.

Though we’re enslaved by the gruesomeness

of the way we die, hoping for a better life than this.

Fall in the woods and a pungent white mist

sweet and strange with the colours of perishing

like an albino paint rag a ghost too late

to put the finishing touches to the masterpiece.

The cartography of dry leaves slimey

as black walnut leeches when the rain lets up

and the few birds that remain can begin

to search for the survivors. When it’s

your time to go, it’s your time to go. Exploring.

If you don’t fall off the rim of the world

you’re limited by. To find a way to go on

walking through the waist-high grass and grains,

among the nuts and the acorns, the disappointed

waterlilies that made much of next to nothing

beside the blue narcissus and the suede cattails.

Maybe see the last of the chicory and asters

passing like stars into oblivion, into, who knows,

a deep, imageless, state of dream and the pure joy

the holy books speak of, creating worlds within worlds

where there is no love nor hate, when nothing

is opposed to nothing, wave and water, wind

and sky, and the heart doesn’t differentiate.

Just a moment of that to renew my faith

in the chaos and order of life on a grand scale.

Just a moment of that to remind me

I’m exalted by my humiliations. I’m fire

in the hearth of the gods I stole it from.

Not to lean too heavily upon the stars for trust.

Not to trust anything about life as if you

could anticipate it to rendezvous with you at the end

of a collapsed bridge, or one that’s burning,

a delinquent maple where the river bends like

an old shapeshifting Etruscan god salvaged by the Romans

as wholly useable as morphine in the land of dreams

they occupied like the nightward of a hospital

they pacified like a society having trouble getting to sleep.

Fate’s a petty thing compared to the death

of the flowers. And what god, secular or superstitious,

biochemical or divine, ever gave a sign,

except randomly, we were benignly possessed

by the imaginative freedom of the image

we were created in? Freedom, too, can play

the abyss when there’s nothing left to extract it from.

PATRICK WHITE