GREED. POLITICS. CORRUPTION BEYOND SURREALISTIC CONCEPTION

GREED. POLITICS. CORRUPTION BEYOND SURREALISTIC CONCEPTION

Greed. Politics. Corruption beyond surrealistic

conception. I’m going mad in self defence.

The delusion of insanity doesn’t look so bad

from here. How did these distortions get

elected to represent the things I stubbornly believe

I so breezily accepted in the sixties? The mediocrities

are fracking the well of the muses and the astronauts

have grown old and died of gravity that use

to float freely high, high above the earth.

There are perennial truths to our experience

of humanity, of being human, that endure,

without divine sanction, or with if you prefer,

to this very day like oxygen and water. Love

and understanding, compassion, empathy,

pity if it’s not meant to destroy someone,

freedom to say, protest, or create without

a profit margin being where all things come to rest

like autumn leaves in a gutter with an iron grate.

Fifty years, a poetic heretic, a literate demon

good for the angels’ imaginations if they’ve

got one among them left of their own. As well

as those abject modes of starmud that

have no idea of what’s shining within them.

The frogs have dressed up like cannibals

far to the east and everything is scum,

born that way like the cosmic eggs of a priest.

Is the day ever going to come, not as

a supernatural act of intervention, whether

God’s an extraterrestrial or not who sneers

at our technology, people realize they need

each other as a coral reef needs the moon

to remind the polyps they’re not alone?

I’ve had enough. I’m overwhelmed

by the termites munching in the house of life,

untimbering the heartwood of the rafters,

undermining the foundations we built

our pyres on, turning our walls to a weather front

as if the rest of us were the asteroids

of a natural catastrophe with hidden strings

like a kite that nose-dived like a puppet

into the powerlines that ignited a universal

conflagration, a good capitalist that fed

on everything it touched, Midas in a vegetable garden

looking for a golden harvest under

the genetically modified rocks that feel

more like a skull of dry ice that’s been fuming

forever it seems, sublimating itself as smoke

and ghosts since the beginning of this new fire age.

I can’t believe how the one-eyed liar can deceive

the many new ways of communicating life

and death issues with the convenience of a cellphone.

A fly on a computer screen. Even walking

beside the Tay River that never lies to me

like my own mindstream offering me a mirage

of what there is to drink from my own reflection.

I see the stems of the fallen leaves stacked

like a logjam or the wicks of clear cut candles

whose flames are single petalled starmaps

of someone who didn’t have to ask if they

were loved or not better in solitude than company.

I feel the suffering of everyone until

I can see it somewhere between the treeline

where the river winds, and the stars overhead

that made it all possible in the shining forges

of their fire-wombs, the sacred smithies who said

one half of you shall plough the moon,

the other, raise a sword against water

that can’t be wounded by the tears in your eyes.

And for the mad espionage of the war mongers

there’s always an adulterous fishing net

the dolphins, muscled as they are, get snagged in

like a spider web, a dream-catcher, a suspension bridge

on fire with the naked acts of the truth

that has no where to hide its eyes or alibis or lies.

How many gates and front doors, entrances compared

to the back, emergency exits, second-holes

of a groundhog’s labyrinth in this house of pain?

I see it in the junkie prostitute’s eyes at twenty seven

open to whatever comes though she puts

a smile on her life to gloss over it and keep

up with the Joneses. I see it in the bones

of the baby muskrat the wolves have been

sniffing around for from the day it was born.

And even the thick asphalt of the rat snake

that made its way through the grass like

a highway slick with rain. Pain. Until

it doesn’t matter anymore it tastes the air

as if it were witching for water with forked lightning.

A million hues of oxymorons on a colour wheel

turning grey as the journey gets longer

than shadows at moonrise on a premeditative sundial.

The agony of giving birth to something bigger

than a self. The impersonality of suffering

though you send it birthday cards that are

always well-meaning however absurd it is

to believe your pain taught you anything but how

to hurt as if it were teaching you to transcend yourself.

Even if you wanted to be a fountain efflorescing

like a mirage in an eyeless desert and you

turned out to be a waterclock going supernova

in the endless emptiness of a blossoming flower.

Even if you walk alone by the Tay River

as you have a hundred troubled times before

at night when the willows, in the summer

of their long green locks, or in the winter

when they open a bordello, are on

a first name basis with your business here.

PATRICK WHITE