Saturday, March 16, 2013

AMONG SO MANY ATROCITIES OF HUMAN AND INHUMAN NATURE


AMONG SO MANY ATROCITIES OF HUMAN AND INHUMAN NATURE

Among so many atrocities of human and inhuman nature,
what forbidden grace adorns the suicide or the ballet of the drunk
obliterated on razorwire wine at nightfall
as the abandoned bottle exchange for empties and grails
prays for rain to wash the acid from a young girl’s eyes
who wanted to learn to read what everyone else
had forgotten about taking advantage of their fear of death
to remember how beautiful the world once was
when the fireflies emerged like Venus in the dusk
growing brighter as the darkness deepened
into riotous starmaps playing charades
with a bestiary of antique zodiacs in the crowns
of the black walnut trees whose mere presence
was enough to astound anyone. How once you could
open a milkweed pod like the womb of a fortune-cookie
and find a Monarch butterfly inside like infinite riches
in a small room, a wishing well that wasn’t
some kind of tarpit that had just swallowed the moon
like a cosmic glain light years before the dragons
were allowed to carry firearms but the mercy of the rain
that used to fall like cool tears on their scorched wings
like leaves in a drought, without putting the green flames
of their fires out, was strictly forbidden by the greed
and undue influence of the lustreless arrogance
of very mediocre men who ate like a plague of locusts
in a field of genetically modified stargrass
that blighted the wheat in the hand of the Virgin
like seeds of light the wind was forbidden to sow
and poisoned the bread we used to break with each other
like black dwarfs of ergot on the taboo spores
of a bad mushroom trip in the tourist trap
of the mind blowing Eleusinian mysteries on crack.

Apocalyptic opulence runs before the storm
like a herald of the rich and ungovernable
with a message to the poor who can sense
what’s coming like the angel of death to the door
by the way it doesn’t eat what’s put before it
like a crumb of flesh and blood off their own plate
they’re still willing to share, in part, like a crust
from the empty cupboard of their heart
with any stranger who’s come in the night
off the road, asking for directions to Wall Street
like the parable of the man who ran to Aleppo,
like the market share of a corporate nemesis
who insisted upon their personhood like a stem cell
that lied to itself posthumously in anonymous board rooms
where issues of life and death were settled like executive coffins
that closed the book on the matter as if
there were no more to be said to the press
than the obituaries they released like doves they read from
about how much damage had been done
to their reputations by the protests of the vociferous dead.

One false idol pushes another idiotic ideology down
and there’s a domino effect of apostate holy wars
that throw their children like strawdogs
into the bonfire of the inanities to bear witness
to the act of being worthy of their futureless afterlives
like the strangle-hold of tapeworms, the dry rot of termites,
the methane vapour trails of maggots in the dungheaps
and mass graves covered in snow like grey hair
on the skull of the body politic that cuts its nose off
to spite its face if anybody contest its right
to eat the eyes out of the roadkill like blow flies
as if there were no greater vision of life than a body bag
wrapped in a flag, placed in a hole, with the stone of the world
resting on its chest to keep it from rising again
like smoke from the family hearth they buried it under.

On the borders of Rome, just before it fell
the hungry Visigoths were compelled to sell
their children into slavery for a haunch of dogmeat
that used to sit under the emperor’s table at Ravenna
and beg for scraps that fell like the superflux of gluttons
to the bestial floor like pork in a budget proposal
to let the poor eat their own and the rich grow fat
on the cannon fodder at the front lines of the war on poverty
like cattle prods and firing squads in an abattoir,
political bloodbanks feeding on the needs of the people
like lobbyists and leeches, ticks and invasive species
of mosquitoes, flies, drones, killer bees and conservatives
that suck the light out of the life, heart, mind, spirit, will
of humans to go on surviving their own exit
as mechanical confabulations of metallic stem cells
with micro chips for Hox genes, oversee the mass extinction
of life grown suspicious of its own food supply,
the air, the water, the sun, the earth, the sky, each other
like a hive of surveillance cameras keeping their third eyes
on the dying wildflowers by the polluted mindstreams
hydrophobically foaming at the mouth of their own headwaters
like an industrial strain of rabies eating its own rotten heart out
in a chaotic rage of conditioned consciousness nemetically resigned
to its own lies, to the intelligent design of its own demise.

PATRICK WHITE

GREY, MILKY SKY IN MARCH


GREY, MILKY SKY IN MARCH

Grey, milky sky in March, less ashes than the whites
of someone’s eye. The sun without a yolk,
the day, the tabla rasa of a cloaking device
I’m effaced by like this blank page I stare at
until I can see through my third eye without
being in disguise, how sad it is most of our lives
are paper-mache masks of lies we’re dying
to believe in like crutches convinced
they’re the flying buttresses of medieval cathedrals.

And not the unfeathered wings of skeletal fledglings
that fell from the nest a long time ago,
naked, vulnerable, the post-mortem effect
of embryos with big flight plans gone awry,
winged horses that weren’t on the agendas of the wind
for that morning’s sky. For every angel
that falls from heaven, a demon rises from hell,
and it’s wonderful how the more spiritual among us
can disguise a helpless yell for help in the white noise
and crystal skulls whose silence is almost
a colour unto itself. And imagination is
a gravitational eye that can bend the light
anyway it wants, so no one sees in straight lines.

Void bound, eyeless, no profit staring into the abyss
hoping to see a quarry of star sapphires
suddenly appear before you diaphanously
like the Pleiades over the eyelashes of the tree line.
It’s hard to break bread above or below the salt
with a human that lives by signs alone.
Harder still to remain compassionately blind
to people who wear the bluebirds of happiness
like chips on their shoulders you have to hood and chain
your falcon to your wrist, to keep from knocking off
like the revelatory shock of meeting your mystic nemesis
like lightning on the road, or a Zen master
beating you out of the zendo with your own broom
after watching you sweep mirages like starmud
off the mirror everyday to keep it clean and open
as an orchid blooming in the shadow of an outhouse.

Better to mudwrestle with the angel in the way
that take a bath in your own grave to renew
the virginity of the moon in iridescent bubbles
that break like fuchsia fragrances of light in hyperspace
when they wink at blood in the water,
like watercolours of poppies in the rain
washed away down the gutters of the slums
like the echo of a gunshot that stains your meditation.

After Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle you can’t
experiment with life, you can only experience it
as a wavelength or a particle depending upon
whether you’re looking at it or not. The same eye
by which I see God is the eye by which she sees me
as Ruysbroeck said, unaware in the fourteenth century
of the quantum entanglement of gender, but just the same
I look at the stars and I can see the resemblance
of the mother of fires in the eyes of everyone I meet.

Even in the sleet weeping in the cracks of the sidewalk
they didn’t mean step on like their mother’s back
or the thresholds of sheep the shepherds of wolves
used to run through this town like clouds in a mud puddle
that soiled their golden fleece like sunspots on their radiance.
Even in the stretchmarks of the memory of rain on Mars,
even in the way the smooth sailing of your heartwood
sometimes knots up like a rock in your mindstream
or the pebble of the world bruises your heel
in your wing-tipped shoes, or a koan of a poem
you can’t get out of your gut like a haiku of bad sushi,
I see the likeness of desperate measures in the beauty
of the stars above the Parthenon, or the waterlilies
in the mystic gardens of the black Taj Mahal.
However immaculate your firefly of insight into the night is
your shining’s just a lamp in the hands of a nightwatchman
unlocking the gates of compassion from the inside out
like the wingspan of a dragon in an aviary of burning doves.

PATRICK WHITE