Tuesday, June 4, 2013

SICKENED BY THE SUPPURATING WOUNDS OF THE AILING WORLD

SICKENED BY THE SUPPURATING WOUNDS OF THE AILING WORLD

Sickened by the suppurating wounds of the ailing world
attended by political maggots who swear they’ll
eat the corruption out of the system, all of it, except
their own shit. Monostomes. They eat with the same mouth
they enter with, and exit like toilet bowls. Politics
with Lyme disease, dusky yellow sunsets in the green dragon blood
of wisdom they’ve amputated the limbs off like a tree
that got in the way of their powerlines. If it’s green,
it’s gangrenous. Barracuda chainsaws snarling
in an old growth forest that’s already been crucified
by the nails of the protesters as Caesar renders unto Caesar
that which is Caesar’s and no one else’s forever and ever amen.

Listened for a pulse in the voices of the corporate poets
long enough and realized the prizes go to echoes of voices
that sing like lobbyists on behalf of their own egos,
in music, in painting, in science, in life and death,
cannibalistic viciousness like thousands of pigs at a trough
talking like an antiseptic mouthwash to sweeten the stink
of old meat on their breath like the carrion of crocodiles.

Go, little rainbow, and find some oilslick to lie down upon
you can enlighten like an auroral tattoo of a butterfly
on the scales of a rat’s snake’s skin. Too much Ariel
and you’ll suffer the karmic revenge of Caliban
in that one big eye in the sky of your Cyclopean
approach to the brutal vicissitudes of life that kiss
the innocent good night on their foreheads, good night like
wasps laying their eggs on the living host
of tomorrow’s diminishing Swallowtails and Monarchs
imbibing neonicotinoids from the fracked housewells
of the flowers. I’ll look for you on pills in suburbia
o, sometime later, when you’re retaining water
like a bored soccer mom in the second phase of the tripartite moon.
I’ll look into your one good eye and I’ll know
without you saying a word, how creatively numb
you had to become to litter the sunny side of the street
with the glitter of rainbows on the wings of infectious houseflies.

The mutants, the ghouls, the grotesque, the gluttony
of the ignorant trying to die with the most toys
in their war chest to address the hosts of their victims
as winners among the victorious ghost writers
who revise history to exonerate the complicit parts
they played in it like sophists of the heart in an abattoir---
the mutants have taken devolution too far for things
to ever change except for the chthonic outrage
of a habitable planet shocked at the damage done
by guests in the house of life it provided for them
out of its own inner resources and a little help from the Leonids.

Anything goes to amuse the mob with its own insanity.
Bread and circuses, foodstamps and the Olympics
to tear down the slums of the poor to fill the hotels
of the mercantile cartels of tropical Sochi. But not to worry,
Darwin said the nations of the big fish eat
the nations of the little fish like krill
strained like bleeding blackberries
through the baleen of bottom feeding blue whales,
and the little fish have to be athletic. Exceed the record
or perish in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro.

Even a loser who upholds the myth of regressive development
by trying as hard as an Algerian immigrant in Paris
to make a living that wouldn’t make his family ashamed of him,
can win a place of affection in the hearts,
if not the hall of fame, by echoing the same defections
in the heartlessness of the audience that applauds him
like a little guy trying so hard against the odds
of the debilities they’ve imposed upon him, they
almost remember what it was like to cry for themselves sincerely.

And here comes the press, the fourth estate, engaged
in checking and balancing the lies of the other three
as a safeguard on democracy like celebrity paparazzi
salaciously whimpering platitudes over a newsworthy corpse
they’re interviewing like blackflies on live tv. Why not
talk directly to the guys who own the freedom to speak
like the stem cells of their iphones cloned as
the Wizard of Oz making a big noise about nothing
behind the mythically inflated misquotes of mosquitoes
humming in their ears behind the story like bloodbanks
at the beginning of a food chain with the logos
of peacocks, third eyes, alphabets, and bare initials
carved into the bark of compromised lovers
who forgot what their names were for a long time ago.

Sick of it. Not ill. Sick. Like a fish swimming
in the polluted waters of life at the infectious stage
of a nuclear reactor throwing plague rats into the watersheds
of water being life, life being water if you’ve ever watched
the flowing comets of goldfish in an aquarium late at night for long.
Sick of the strong stepping on the throats of the weak
like snapping turtles at the jugulars of wild swans.

Sick of the asylum, the hospital, the drugstore, the funeral home
the old and disabled retire to when their benefits are cut off
like neurons from hydro, their redoubtable wisdom
unable to keep up with the payments on technology.

Sick of the bumper crops of pharmaceuticals threshed
like genetically modified grains of wheat when the moon is full
and the emergency wards are howling like extracurricular ambulances
they put on in Montreal like banshees at a harvest barn dance
and the violins are shrieking like hysterical crackheads
for more drugs to put them out of their misery
like the mercy of administrative angels on the psych ward.

Someone should publish a dream grammar for the sacred syllables
of our mother tongues raging like offended flower vendors
in the shadows of the Tower of Babel and market it
to the tourists so they don’t get burnt buying a rose
with more thorns than petals in the souk before
the bomb goes off like house nails reroofing
the leak in the shelter of the Lord like the meteor showers
and lightning strikes at the children of Sodom and Gomorrah
who don’t have a chance of growing up to be
a mahdi, a messiah, a hidden imam, exilic patriarchs
commanding all foreign wives be put aside,
a purging of brides heuristically unchosen by a choosey God
as a template for problem-solving extemporaneous
marital affairs. Who dares rend asunder what love
has joined together? The weld is stronger than the original bond.
As the alloys that transgress the limits of the pure element
usually take a sharper edge honed on the wheel of birth and death
than the copper chisels blunted on the pyramids,
dead, dead, dead, innocent and green as moldy bread.

Sick of the disappointments and diminishments
of my humanity. Sicker still of the cloying nostalgia
for what it used to be when the heart was a cause celebre
and not the passing effect of some random circumstance
massed against me like a god particle or birth defect
that’s difficult to detect. I’m here. Where are you?
Not cool, o no, to be disowned by the guildhalls
and literary cults with their unaffordable sentiments
trying to raise awareness of their trivialized art
like the icons and memes of quasi revolutionary saints
parading through Red Square as if life were just
one big chequered table cloth spread out on a sunny spot
in the grass that isn’t as green as it used to be
before they started making the homeless pick up
their own corpses as if they were fouling the foot path.

Not a good space, not pleasantly germaine
to the comas of taste flower-arranging chaos
to go with the urn on the mantle, still too hot to handle,
though it’s beginning to flatline like a dragon that’s flown the coup
or a phoenix in an aviary that sings as if it caught the croupe
from a nightingale with a crown of thorns for a larynx.

Sick of living in a shallow time, in a car pool of shore-huggers
who believe it’s enough to shed a tear or two
to claim they, too, were washed ashore like piratical survivors
who braved the perfect storms on the great night seas
of sorrow and awareness. Sometimes I’ve just got
to get the abyss out of the universe deep inside,
lance the abscess, trepan the prophetic pressure
of the dying planet of my uninhabitable skull
with all its shepherd moons volcanically, expurgate
the ambergris of a sperm whale like a more honest
fragrance of perfume, stick my finger down my throat
like a vomitorium in a Colosseum where
roses of blood in the dirt are being pruned
and tied back like the tree in the moon by
dead head gardeners in a high-walled abbatoir
fascinated by the avant garde aesthetics of blood spatter.

Got to get it out like the Oxyrhyncus sayings
of Jesus Christ, or the Freudian dowagers
of sex-crazed Vienna at the end of a neurotic empire,
or the thorn of the moon in my third eye
I gouged out like the semi precious stone
of a planet embedded in its orbit like an electron
or an engagement ring leftover from an ancient love affair
so as not to be destroyed by what I don’t bring forth.
Out, out, through the emergency exit door
of my therapeutic puncture wound, sick of living
in a shallow time where what’s written off
as the effluvium of the heart in the ditches of inspiration
reeks more sincerely of human content, than what
the mouthwashes and famous deodorants are writing about
as if the stink of enlightenment were the wise
passing cosmic gas just enough to inspire a jackass
to bray like a book with a carrot in front of its nose
that grows like lies in the heartwood of Pinnochio’s.
When your imagination has so little to reveal to you
why try to expose it as if it were real by acclamation?


PATRICK WHITE

MORE PEACE THAN DEATH IN THE QUALITY OF THE SILENCE TONIGHT

MORE PEACE THAN DEATH IN THE QUALITY OF THE SILENCE TONIGHT

More peace than death in the quality of the silence tonight.
In such a vastness, after so many turnings at the crossroads,
I can feel you breathing in the dark within me
as I used to watch you dream for hours
in the glow of the fire on an ice bound night
when no one was on the roads like buttered mirrors
and only the shadows and moonlight moved
like ghosts that were sure of their footing
and the elastic cats were stretched out in the warmth
like deserted shorelines as far as they could go
as if they never wanted to come back to themselves.

My love for you burned like a poppy of blood
in the white gold of the wheat of my body
I offered you like bread, as you, yours to me,
wine that had been crushed like wild grapes
from the vineyards of a thousand new moons.

Though space and time be one continuum,
dimension and direction, vectors of shadows on a sundial,
two feathers of the same flightpath of a nightbird
that disappears into the silence of its longing
as if it had found its voice in the stillness of the immensities
that enclosed us like two secrets that revealed
what was intimately human about the mystery of life,
just to feel the light gathering in my eyes
as I looked upon your face the way the stars
shine down upon the earth was always and only
as far as I ever had to seek to know why I lived.

The journey finds itself like a planet around a fire at night.
And all that is huge and incomprehensible about love,
is contained in the watershed of a single tear
we shed in joy as it floods the heart to realize
how wrong our starmaps were for so long about so much
though they try to fix our brevity to a time and a place
and a myth we could look up to when we’re lost
all we ever had to do, rooted in each other’s starmud,
was let the shining find us, even on the coldest nights,
like flowers blooming in the soporific aura of a fire
while your eyes were dreaming like a nightstream
under its eyelids of ice, and mine, for all the lightyears since
my seeing has ripened in time, and this night is no exception,
were grateful to witness the poppies flaring
in the gardens of the afterlife of Orion as near
as a pair of cardinals taking shelter in a snowbound cedar tree.

We burned brightly together for awhile, did we not---
two flames of a root fire folding its wings
like a love poem I wanted you to find in the morning
that didn’t return to its grave like a ghost of smoke
lingering long into the dawn of that hour you awoke
beside me, the sun gleaming in the crude chandeliers
of the icicles and the snow fronds of the ferns on the windows,
though things that were near and familiar have been
estranged by space and time, and the melting roads we once
walked down together in the spring are long gone, I write to you
in warm tears as I did that night in the glow of a fire
even after all these years, that can still take the chill off the air
as if the flames in the heartwood of the lives we are consumed by
refeather the dragons on the pyres of sumac, even time, though
it’s cold and cutting, can’t blow out like stars flowering on the wind.


PATRICK WHITE