IT’S GETTING EASIER TO DIE
It’s getting easier to
die looking at the way the world is. We’ve got this bigger brain
pan thanks to evolution but I think we’re just exaggerated chimps.
Vicious flea-pickers nibbling on parasites for strength in numbers
and the security of a small place under the table like a missing link
in the food chain we call love. Even absurdity has lost its pebble
like a misshapen asteroid trying to bring something to life by making
a big impact on the dinosaurs of Yucatan. Panspermia. Martian meteors
like spare kissing stones lying in the snow of Antarctica waiting to
be cubed like the Kaaba into the continental skullcap of a new
religion. Someone told me we were an intelligent species once and
that knowledge opens doors. No one can argue with a heart transplant
but knowledge looks more and more like a doorman at the shrine of
ignorance selling doves on the sly to the unholiest of holies
climbing on its knees up the stairs where it throws its crutches away
like the election promises of born again politicians on their way to
Damascus in sunglasses. Even to say the words noble aspiration
is to invite the sneers of a lobby group of crows. How many cosmic
eggs do you need to see smashed on the rocks at the foot of the tree
in spring before you get the idea that death is a way of life down
here where the wind rocks the cradle and the babies fall to their
deaths like Siberian shamans. How many turtles have made it all the
way to adulthood like children running for cover in the high tides of
providence in a Pearl Harbour of gulls without ever having heard a
lullaby from their mothers’ mouths? The aesthetics of desecration
have salted the roots of art. Morality is a game of snakes and
ladders. Politics is a card shark playing strip poker with the
public. Religion is a pervert that lies about the light and denies
the existence of the shadows it casts on the spirit even as it scars
the children like sexual flagellants for life. Has Jesus really
become a blue blood haemophiliac who needs Rasputin to keep him from
bleeding to death?
Scotty knocks at the
door. He needs a ride out to Watson’s Corners. I need the money but
I decline the offer. He checks his facebook page and goes. I commit
financial suicide and shake my head like a twist of the knife at how
ludicrously demented I am by getting back to this. Baby needs new
shoes. And here I am standing like Empedocles on the rim of Aetna
getting ready to plunge into the plasmid magma oozing from a wound in
my continental drift. But you can’t become a legend without living
the farce of creativity as if it were something inconceivable you
could believe in because it had nothing to do with you. I raise the
skull and crossbones and stand for an anthem of starmud that bleeds
out like Van Gogh’s ear or Manet’s matador lying like a dead
honeybee in a rose of blood. Ever since the late sixties I’ve been
dying of love and compassion and the aristocratic poverty of poetry
as if they were the only local anecdotal antidotes I had left to spit
back in the cobra’s eyes. I knick the snake with whipper snippers,
railroad tracks, and razorblades. And the snake spits back like the
Taliban or an honour killing by splashing acid in the eyes of an
Afghan girl who wants to learn to read or fall in love. I live in a
town called Perth not far from Last Duel Park. But I’ve pawned my
silver bullet to pay the rent and Zorro isn’t fronting me any more
swords like an American foreign policy run by Boeing and Halliburton.
I’m a dancing master in a snake pit. I’m down to the last
G-string of the spiderweb I’ve strung between the horns of the Lyre
of Orpheus like a cosmic dreamcatcher in a nightmare of killer bees
and Maenads screaming for my dismemberment like a firestorm of air
raid sirens in Dresden where people were twisted into the shapes of
Pompeian agony like an Alexandrian library of matchbooks. Inspiration
rides the dragon with sidereal spurs of apocalyptic indignation and
rage at what is happening to us as human beings at our own hands.
Evolution never made these kinds of demands on us to change. To
mutate like logos in the corporate genome of Coca Cola imperializing
Belize. Eleven dimensions of space and time and one unknown continuum
of death. How can love ever hope to penetrate the hareem of hymens in
the hyperspace of the multiverse without relying on the cop-out of a
virgin birth? Propagation without ecstasy. Sex is food. People are
the krill of corporate blue whales breaching like a market. And love
is their ambergris. The x-rated vomit of Parisian perfumes. The
R-complex at the back of the brain we hold in a commonwealth of
carrion like houseflies and crocodiles. We’re still snapping
turtles under the carapace of our neo-cortex. Don’t kid yourself.
We’re still the same old scum-sucking mud dwellers that littered
the bottom with the bones of gutted swans eras ago. Twenty-five
million children a year are shovelled into the grave pits of their
open mouths still gaping after all these horrifying years at the
atrocity of how blithely we let them starve to death while obesity is
about to have a heart attack that’s going to feel like the
catastrophic revenge of an indigestible planet. Gather ye rosebuds
and wealth while ye may. Carpe diem. Seize the day. Because
tomorrow’s going to come like the false dawn of an unmarrowed bone
through the nose of an unmarried cannibal and grab you by the neck
like a drug cartel playing narco music on the Spanish guitar of your
jugular vein. Prophetic skulls are dancing themselves to death in
violent paroxysms of hydrophobic rabies trying to hold back the rain
like sacred clowns in a mirage of nightmarish pain. We’re stinging
ourselves to death like scorpions in a ring of fire. We’re playing
Russian roulette with lethal interrogatives we raise to our temples
like the triggers of crescent moons at the business end of our cul de
sacs. Murder like war is a job creation program for the poor to give
killing for the rich a purpose in life and a reason to get up in the
morning. In the backrooms and dark alleys of a doomed consortium of
corporate laybyrinths I’ve learned to whistle Mr. Bluebird’s
On My Shoulder like a port-a-pack heat seeking missile and
address my peers when I’m on my own as if the third eye of the
Wizard of Oz were taking aim through a fully enlightened keyhole at
terrorists planting bombs in the Yellow Brick Road. Democracy lands
in the Fertile Crescent like the House of the Unrepresentatives of
the People on the wicked witch of the east. You can watch her toes
curl like fiddleheads and the embryos of oilslicks that will rise up
like a snake pit to sink the fangs of the first and last crescents of
Ramadan like the Old Man of the Mountain into your throat. Hash.
Venom. Assassins in the shadows of your sundials and eclipses like a
black snake under the pillow you dream on waiting for the tooth
fairy. Radioactive noon at midnight. The human heart too scorched to
feel any pity. Calloused hands close the eyes of the dead like
can-openers. Magisterial pomp and ceremony attends the trivia of the
irrelevant like the paparazzi a golden chariot being driven by a rock
and roll sun king with the popularity of a pimp through a slum of
infatuated children. Justice upholds the freedom of expression like
gun laws in the ghettoes of Philadelphia. Compassion has become the
idealistic shill of a faith healer laying his hands on the daughters
of his parishioners like the cervical scar tissue of the dilated
profit margins that wound the flesh and the spirit like an empty
wallet some misguided soul returned in hell.
Night now. Skateboarders
outside in the deserted street. No one knows what I do up here but I
feel like I’ve been testing lead kites in a wind tunnel all day
long. Been working out creatively for a heavy lift. But I’m not
sure if I’m strong enough yet. My head is pounding something
momentous on the anvil of my heart. Tempering swords in a trough of
blood that hisses like the background radiation of the ghost of a
cosmic snake. Or a thought train mourning like a funeral procession
in the distance. No rain. So the windows are thick with dirt and
stars. And the streetlamps are wilting like black-eyed Susans with
tungsten petals in the heat. She loves me not she loves me not she
loves me not like losing lottery tickets. I’m reaching
critical mass like a nuclear reactor that o.d.’d on its own
plutonium 239. My eyes glow in the dark but what I see makes me wish
I were blind. Something’s tattooing prophetic starmaps on the
inside of my eyelids. My brain is shredding secret insights into the
conspiratorial nature of the future of life. Putting words in the
mouth of the embassy incinerator like apple blossoms and autumn
leaves just before the wind leaves town without the orchard. Taking
too long to put a little English on the spin of the planet like a
cue-ball in the right hand pocket of a black hole. You lose control
in the moment if you hesitate. And I can hear some Zen master
battering me with my own advice. Stand up. Sit down. Walk left.
Walk right. Walk zigzag. Walk straight. But whatever you do don’t
wobble. But even if I make the shot. Nobody wins.
It’s getting easier to
die when I see how many more innocent there are among the dead than
there are among the living. I have a survivor’s guilt. And nowhere
to expiate it except on a poem on a painting or the flip side of
Patti Smith. I am a Canadian artist. I feel nothing but guilt. And
it’s hard not believe sometimes that I’m not already dead and
what I’ve been dying and living for all these years is a just this
mindless art of the life of the mind. And fifty years of poetry isn’t
worth one loaf of bread in the grasp of a starving child. What comes
out of the mouth. What goes in. Like ebb and neap tides dragged
around by the moon by the hair where they practise rape like a
martial art against women in the Congo. In the wars of the Druids it
used to be that you could defeat a tribe by learning the secret name
of their god. Bran. Or Exxon. For example. But these days they go
straight for the genome. And it’s been a struggle even here where
you can grow fat on the garbage of Toronto just to survive. I was
born under the street. Learned classical Greek. Didn’t want to be
victimized by the stereotype of the golden poor boy who got rich to
lift his family out of poverty by his bootstraps like the spontaneous
creation of the universe and reclaimed his throne from his wicked
father as if he’d been raised in secret by a wise old woodsman. And
who knows? Maybe I should have tried. But the sixties was firing up
and I was going through economic culture shock at a wealthy
university in my own hometown. It was my mother who taught me to cry.
It was my father who taught me to rage. Fire danced on the water. I
was a cool savage in an age of abandonment. I learned to throw stones
and thaw like ice at the same time so I didn’t get caught living in
a glass house. I hung around a lot of rich kids with long hair who
all got shorn like Samson and ended up lawyers in their daddy’s
office after they pulled the pillars of the establishment down. So I
put down the sword and picked up the pen and in the deafening silence
of the afterlife of the party when everyone stopped believing in the
music and returned to their senses like the Toronto Stock Exchange
thought if I couldn’t do anything else to justify the ambiguous
luck of being born into a selectively prosperous country I could
write poetry that would scream murder for those who were being killed
pre-emptively because they didn’t have a voice of their own. I
reconciled poverty guilt rage education inspiration fire water and
light in one austere calling too high-minded to call a literary
career. I was a prophetic skull in a desert that women like to dance
for. I was a poet. I was endowed with a great negative capability for
being nothing. I let my identity lapse like a passport. I wiped my
face off the mirror with the sleeve of my shirt to see more clearly
what I was looking at. The mirrors haven’t heard of me in years. I
spent twenty years learning secret tree alphabets in a poetic college
on the island of Mona and became a wandering poet scholar. An
astronomical priest of sacred clowns who could wander unharmed
through the clash of armies through a mystical path in the Blood Red
Sea. I studied murder. I studied genocide. I looked at the heaps of
spectacles piled in the lost and founds of Auschwitz like the spindly
legs and hourglass thoraxes of dead insects in the commercials for
Raid. And I felt my way into the camp as close as I could for someone
who had not been killed or lived their way through it until I
understood that most of the passions of humankind are nothing more
than insecticides for butterflies and honey-bees. That angels were
crop-dusters and there was DDT and Xyklon B and mustard gas on the
apple of knowledge in the garden of Eden long before Eve took a bite
out of it. The Holocaust taught me three things. The overwhelming
complicity of silence when murder is being done. That humans are the
scourge of God when he flagellates himself for their creation by
whipping his back with black hydra-headed snakes in jackboots that
cock their hats and snap their heels to attention like the triggers
of a firing squad trying to shoot the stars out like a disciplined
eclipse. That one should never underestimate the great opportunistic
potential there is in human suffering. I scream for the bone. I
scream for the blood. I scream for the flesh of those who had lovers
and children and violins that set the teeth of the windows on edge
when they were practising. I scream for the home-made socks on the
corpse of the dead child being used as a doorstop to the crematorium.
I scream for the button that was torn off the jacket of the boy at
the back of the cattle-car and I scream for the needle in
fastidiously loving hands that sewed it on and then sewed on a yellow
star. I scream for the six pointed. I scream for the eight-pointed
star. I scream for Isaac. I scream for Ishmael. I scream for the
gypsies the gays the German Christians the Poles the Slavs and the
children in line at the foodbank being cowed by charity into licking
the boots of the anti-welfare protesters as a way of saying thanks.
Can you hear me where
you live? My voice shatters the stars an octave higher than the
celestial spheres that crack like wineglasses. I’m flint knapping
chandeliers into holy Clovis spears of light and arrowheads I’ve
dipped in my blood to make sure the first sword of truth I hang over
your head is wounded by my own first. I scream like the scarlet
letter on the Whore of Babylon’s forehead. And blood is trickling
out of the corners of my eyes at what I see. Something thunderous and
heavy-limbed approaches. The fireflies are panicking to get out of
the way of the lightning and the ants are amassing in heaps of
defunct punctuation marks that can read like pundits the signs of the
writing on the wall as if they’d reached the end of the trail.
Drunks smashing whiskey
bottles on the street. The violence is too deep in us. The greed. The
need. The excruciations of apocalypse will not enlighten us. Release
is not liberation. Desecration doesn’t make one worthy of hell. A
lightning rod won’t tell you where to dig the well. I’m sick of
this. My skull is thick with paleolithic wallpaper I’m trying to
compile into a Book of the Dead for casual readers with short life
spans. Even madness looks like it’s wearing sensible shoes compared
to walking barefoot through the scorched cities of Rumi and
Hieronymous Bosch where the black corpses practise the yogic postures
of death. We won’t transcend being human by mending being human
until our identity is drowned like a torch among stars trying to get
a mirage of an insight into what it is we’re seeing when we look
back at them. But who am I kidding? Idealism is the footstool of a
hanged man. Who takes a match to go looking for a volcano? I scream
for the runaway in her chrysalis of shadows in the corners of the
doorway across the street trying to snort cocaine from the back of
her hand like fairy dust on the pinkest of her dreams. Good night
Tinkerbelle. Good night. I scream for Betty who went to nightschool
for her affliction and received her degree last night in
post-graduate suicide when she finally freed herself from her
addiction to addiction and died of an overdose. I scream murder. I
scream culpability. I scream for the unphotogenic atrocities of slow
human attrition drawing the agony out like junkie Don Quixotes
tilting at the windmills of their arms. Or cracking rocks with
Sisphyus to roll up the hill in the morning like crumbs of the sun
over the whole sapiently forsaken earth. Babies get eaten by
pitbulls. The homeless heroes are demonized. Demons are lionized and
then sent back to where they came from. Political decisions are
passed like hold-up notes to a volunteer teller at a food bank.
Stunned. Beaten. Abandoned. Betrayed. Throw a snake into a fire and
it just might sprout wings and turn on you like a dragon. Nemetic
karma. Dark matter. The spontaneous reversal of spin in a charged
particle field. The people are poor. Dispirited. Ravaged by
political warlords. The global oligarchs have stolen the moon from
their windows like a corporate logo. One lick of jam in the jar. One
crust of bread that once modelled for Van Gogh’s painting of his
boots. It wasn’t much of a journey if you’re still a traveller at
the end of it. The road walks on with or without us. Hurry up. Hurry
up. It’s got wings on its heels and an immensely hopeless message
that makes a black hole look like an optimist. Deranged gates and
bent weathervanes. All the emergency exits blocked by our grand
entrance as the most intelligent species to ever fuck up what they
were doing on earth. And hell. We’re not even kind or spiritually
well mannered. But isn’t it like listening to shadows in the blaze
of a Roman triumph? You are mortal. Don’t cradle your reflection on
the waters of life like the only survivor in the lifeboat of your
hands. From one dazzling extreme to another of eyeless despair. Rage
upgrades the contradictions of life and death into dirty mind bombs
of anti-matter. Serpentine wavelengths of radioactivity that are as
immune to us as we are to their antidote. And even the animals given
only four choices to throw their lives in the ring of evolution like
shepherd moons around a savage planet. The abattoir. The black
market. The lab. Or the zoo. Gruesome tomorrows where you’ll be
investigated for the political nature of your sorrows. Enforced
consumerism. Ants and aphids. The scales of justice a spy satellite
in the constellation of Libra. Spiritual espionage where your third
eye plays all three sides at once. Data is power. And dice are the
new currency. The human spirit decultified by pharmaceutical
exorcists. The money changers throw Jesus out of the temple along
with his doves. Peace will say render unto Caesar that which is
Caesar’s and that which is not. And if you want to follow me. Go
your own way. And don’t come back. Hell loses its sting compared to
the venom of life on earth. There’s nothing holy enough left to
scare anyone with the night sweats unless they’re going through
withdrawal. A man of vision is a mugshot of a politician. Mystery.
Enigma. Paradox. Oxymoronic ambiguity. The intuitionally unteachable
concupiscence of the inevitable. Irony. Longing. Inspiration. Reason
and compassion are all retooled as commercially acceptable mimetic
paradigms of behaviour. The one-eyed liar throws his voice like a
ventriloquist into the echo chambers of the heart. And the puppet
poets design a use for art that no one could have imagined until they
were told.
Getting old. Getting
easier to die. And the answers to the incomprehensible sublimities of
the question why always seem so much tackier than the starless
silence of a lost song bird disappearing into the distance as if to
fly out of the cage through the night window were to win your wings
like a sky that’s always waving good-bye. I’m reminded of Hart
Crane jumping off the stern of the Orizaba at high noon in his
pyjamas a hundred and fifty miles off the coast of Cuba. And the glee
on his face as he drowned. Where the cedar leaf divides the sky I
was promised an improved infancy. If you can’t find any use for
your life. Live for art. Add your musical note to the choir of
celestial spheres like one long scream of a tuning fork that
resonates with the times like a lightning strike on a sacred tree.
There are more creative ways of waiting for death than standing like
an unused shovel in the corner. If you want to be a master grave
digger first apprentice yourself to a garden. Then you’ll know what
it’s like to feel the roots of life groping through the darkness of
their starmud like blind star-nosed moles waiting for their third eye
to open. Root fires creep like dirty rumours among the cedars of
Lebanon in the valleys of death. I scream for the children who twist
in their sleep as if every breath they took were a kite on a lifeline
tangled like a sour note in the nervous hymnals of the power lines.
Every bird is a whole note. And every sky the sheet music of silence.
You can sing like a parakeet or shriek like the ailerons on an eagle
dive-bombing a Japanese invasion fleet. You can hum like the drone of
the avenging engines of a hive of approaching killer bees. Or you can
bite your tongue to see if it’s real gold or not. If the best steel
really does go through the forge.
See how the water-lily
pads its swamp life with beautiful concessions of enlightenment? It’s
rooted in leprosy and rot but can you taste the flavours of the
reflections of the stars that are mingled in its mindstream like an
empty lifeboat on the moon? You can test the atmosphere for the
noxious vapours of decay like air on the tines of the tongue of a rat
snake hunting toxic frogs like a radioactive wavelength of water with
fangs. And you can have a lightning insight into the double feature
of life that turns the lights of the matinee out at noon to
foreshadow the horrors of what’s coming to a theatre near you.
Cannibal frogs and punctual vipers with lockjaw. Soon. You get the
big picture? Clarity is a dream’s worst nightmare. And there are
times when all you can do is sit like an insomniac in the middle of a
sleepwalking audience and scream like a air raid siren until you’re
as hoarse and broken as the wishbone of Orpheus’ lyre when it got
stuck in the throat of his prophetic skull bobbing its way like a
silver apple of the moon all the way from Thrace to Mytilene on the
island of Lesbos with greetings for Sappho and Terpander. Or you can
lay a cool vision like a herbal poultice down on the forehead of a
skull that’s been running a high fever that makes it delirious with
life. You can grow orchids in the shadow of an outhouse. Or you can
drain the swamp and clean its wound of infection to keep the
spiritual gangrene of a planet in crisis from spreading. Or you can
turn your back on the urgency of the emergency nightshifts like the
dark side of a harvest moon and say Physician heal thyself as
if your life were held in ransom by a medical plan issued by a drug
cartel. Knowing it might be the butterflies with beautiful bedside
manners that are wearing their wings like nurses caps on the terminal
wards of the pharmaceutical asylums but it’s the maggots that mend
the wounds and prepare the bones for a decent burial like
graverobbers convinced of an afterlife. I give you my word like a
boomerang on the cutting edge of space that what goes around like a
helicopter gunship comes back like a galactic sawblade in your face.
On the thresholds of the available dimensions and event horizons of
the future the black rose of blood whose beauty was eclipsed by the
miscarriage of the corpse of a child whose eyelids were shut in death
like shedding petals will be frisked for thorns like pins in the
heart of a voodoo doll looking for revenge on us all. Beware the fury
of the dark mother when the moon is in its crone phase and she sees
what we’ve done to her young. The female principle of the world
flares like a Medean cobra rising like an executioner’s hood over
her shattered cosmic eggs. Can you read the sign on her mantle like
the royal cartouche of a deadly queen sealing a death warrant in our
own blood? Can you taste the poisonous fruit of your loins in the
sweetmeats of the children she serves up like the four and twenty
blackbirds of a ghoulish lullaby to the nightmarish apple piety of
your blasphemous genes? The Achilles heel of the destroyer of worlds
will be stung by a Parisian arrow of love with the wingspan of a
vampiric universe sucking the blood out of the venom under the sign
of the cross that makes the first incision. And nothing will be
healed. Seven come eleven like a winning lottery ticket at the all
night grocery store on the corner of hell and heaven but the
short-sighted dice trying to game the table will still roll with
their self-destructive luck like snake-eyes staring through them.
Medusan puncture-wounds to the moon rock of the heart. The colon of
the asp at the end of our imperialistic aspirations to live in the
lap of luxury like Egypt but kill like Rome. But what follows is
astronomically tedious and as far from home as the light of an occult
candle in the hands of a lonely exile tabooed by its own creation
myth has ever been driven out into the darkness on its own. What hour
is it? Time casts our shadows like Mayan calendars on shark-finned
sundials circling the penumbral blood lines of a feeding frenzy where
there is no host there is no guest at the foodbank. Just the ghosts
of starving children wiping the crumbs of their dream of life from
the corners of their eyes like the dead waking up to a nightmare.
PATRICK WHITE
