I HAVE PASSED BEYOND RAGE
I have passed beyond rage
like light through a shattered lense
to try and understand
with an open, clear mind
the brutality of a species
that upstages its own humanity
by sticking its head up its own ass-end
for insight into why
it’s up to its neck in shit.
The daffodils may be greening
their spiritual third eyes
like periscopes coming up
to scan the scene for survivors
and it’s all well and good I suppose
to try and win the sharks over with band-aids
and charm the demons that encroach like night
with the tinkling of mystic chandeliers,
but we’ve been killing each other
for millions of years
as if the way we walked upright out of the tall grass
down the long road of our new perspective
were just a more efficent way
of exterminating humans by the brainload
as if they were the passing thoughts
of a savage liar
in an abandoned embassy
burning people like paper
committed to the voices in the fire
that rage like prophets in a fortune-cookie
of our forthcoming end.
And you can cherish
the writing on the wall
as if it were God’s last loveletter
just before she died,
and save your tears like windows
that shattered when you cried
like a stranger in exile to hear the news
but the fury of your outrage
is soon spent like a spraycan under a bridge
expressing yourself in blood
like a trigger on a heart
enclosed in parentheses.
For example, over the years
I’ve devoted seven books
to the suffering of others
but no one got fed
and the children are just as dead
as their mothers.
I was born in a prosperous nation
where I ground stars for a living
into chromatically aberrated
goblets of astonishing clarity
under the begruding goad
of an ambiguous education
that taught me
I had to lick the glass
if I wanted to taste the light
in the last drop of wine
to fall from the eyes of the divine,
but that all turned out to be
no more than wax
flowing down a candle
at a black mass
that went out for good
when I realized
that a collection of spies
isn’t a real neighbourhood.
It’s one planet.
You can’t cut people
out of your pie
like the bad parts of an apple.
You can’t let children die
in unspeakable corners of the earth;
you can’t rub the poor
like the crumbs of a bad dream
out of your eyes when Darfur,
Zimbabwe, Somalia, Palestine,
Aghanistan, Iraq, North Korea,
the Congo, North Vietnam, Iran
are all organs of your own body
shutting down in septicaemic shock.
There are millions of lives
all over the world
even as I say this
being put out
like bubbles of blood in the rain
that will wash them away
like an incriminating stain
on the Roman marbles of politics.
You can’t shed people like petals
to save the flower;
or ignore the root-rot
and favour the grain
as if the gangrene in your toe
would never reach your brain.
The old days may be falling
everywhere on their swords
like the clocks
of a patrician coup gone wrong
and history be nothing more
than a deaf composer
trying to symphonize the screaming
with a dead stick
but the table of contents of any lie
is always longer
than the book
that follows it around like a shadow,
and when we all sit down tonight to eat
from the same board of a planet
above and below the salt
there will be more weapons on the menu
than meat
as we throw our children
over our shoulders
like expendable scraps to the dogs
that lick our feet like military budgets.
But I have grown beyond rage
like a generation of cherry blossoms
that were swept along like the sixties in a sewer
or the sails of a regata of protest placards
written in blood that caked the mirrors
like lipstick on the skull
of an unidentified child whore
who was buried trying to tunnel out
of her own fingerprints
like a worm in the orchards of a bride
with HIV.
And this is nothing, these words, these thoughts
this poem. Nothing.
Just another sleazy mirage
in the impotent deserts
of moral masturbation.
Another website
spinning the light like a spider
as if it were a jewel in a dreamcatcher
with agendas of its own
in a room where everyone
sleeps alone like a gun
or the last compass handed out
like a new direction
at a needle-exchange
for frequent flyers.
If the whole of your life
amounts to no more
than one loaf of bread
in the hands of starving child,
you have done much.
If you’re totally fucked-up and lost
and things are dirty and ugly and mean
if you’re slumped in the corner
tripping without any bones,
if you’re brain is shaking like a fist
at the exactitudes of pain
you call down upon yourself
like retribution
in tears of acid rain;
if you know where God is buried
but you’re sure you can hear him breathing
when you put your ear to his grave
and you’re trying with all your might
to dream him into existence again,
or you traced fame out as a child
in your own breath with your own finger
like a constellation on a window
but all you can see now
is a skidmark on the sky;
you can achieve total enlightenment
in a nanosecond
by simply applying yourself like a cool herb
to a child’s injured eye.
You can draw yourself out of yourself
like an infection,
like a disease of the light
the moment you lay yourself down
like the poultice of the moon
on a child’s wounded waters.
Whatever your fate, tragedy, farce,
running sore, soap operatic life may be,
even if there’s only one drop of pure compassion left,
one clear eye among the oilslicks
that have haemorraged into your polluted sea
like nights when you didn’t get off,
that’s still enough clarity to understand
that compassion is the essential insight
that will get you up off your knees like Atlantis
rising up out of your toxic deluge
like a continent with the voice of a tree
calling out to the dove
that was sent out like a child’s hand
from the cage of a refugee camp in western Sudan
to look for land,
and holding out a branch,
be it dead or green
to the birds and the blossoms,
wash yourself clean of the filth in the fountain
like blood off the wing of a child.
If you wake up in the morning
and ask yourself
whose mind this is
you’re squatting in,
drill down deep into yourself
like a well for water
and when you come to something wet
raise yourself up like a chalice
to the lips of a child
that’s been drinking from a sewer
and I promise you your mind
out to the infinite abyss of darkness
where the stars go blind
will write your name
in a living language
everyone can understand
on the towels of a fabulous palace.
And you may think you’re a genius,
brighter than chrome,
or a microscope of a scholar
deeply immersed in the ancient muck
of the Via Cloaca of Rome,
delighted to uncover hard evidence
that their shit was much like our own;
or beautiful beyond comparison
with the brevity of the dawn,
or talented as a rock star
that can’t be paled by the sun
or upstaged by the moon
that fronts him like a band on tour,
but if compassion doesn’t flow through you
like the sweetness of a nightstream through a tree,
you will be known
by the fruits of your calling
like a windfall of skulls
shaken out of their cradles
when the wind
blows you away
like the topsoil
of a deforested brain
in the rootless dust
of an unclean defection
of a heart, of a life
that’s never tasted rain.
PATRICK WHITE
