NEWS OF THE WORLD

NEWS OF THE WORLD

 

News of the world.

Atrocity and triviality

in a sickening surrealistic remix.

A merry-go-round of tv cameras

running with the bulls

at a revivalist rodeo and barbecue.

So much depends upon suffering.

So much depends upon

looking at everything

from every point of view imaginable

without seeing anything.

The naked woman.

The window.

The peeping tom.

The culpable light.

The complicit night.

And the pundits and the fools,

the holy men in between commercials

being consulted like discussion panels

by clean announcers objective as bleach

who express their umbrage in tones of grey

without smudging the mood too much

like an eyebrow of a cloud

rising over Auschwitz

as if they were strangers passing by

the corpses of the audience they want to reach.

Gluttony swells like a spider in a panicked web

tearing under the weight

of the consumer and consumed.

Corruption dresses up like bad meat

in the celestial chiffons of its innumerable blessings

and smiles successfully all the way through the interview

as if the taste of its own shit were as sweet

as the financial butterflies born of the fiscal maggots

who are eating their way through us all.

A child is raped.

A child is starved to death.

A child is poisoned by the water she drinks

like a waterlily in a sewer,

an orchid in the shadow of an outhouse.

A child is sold into perversion

like an unviolated taboo

to be abused like a threshold.

A child is showered in fairy dust

even as stars of white phosphorus

burn like the stars she wished upon

through her skin.

A child is taught to kill to belong

to the rabid scavengers of the ideology

that savaged her parents with glee

in the name of a more corrupt liberty.

And the senators mourn her plight publicly

like a baby racoon in the teeth of a heart-breaking night

as they adjust their opinions to their hair-dos condolently

and encrust themselves like tiger mussels

to the polluted lakes of their word.

Home-grown honesty snuffs the cocaines of celebrity

and buffs the camera light

with just enough virtue

to true itself to its own high like the movie-star

of a new religion opening its cheesey smile

like a crackhead in prime time

who loves you all

for being bathetically more tragic than him.

The whim of the moment

whips the oxcarts of discipline

like the sadistic masters of a reality show

that juices its ratings with masochists

that nobody wants to know

and everybody watches.

A running shoe runs off

with the foot of a child

like a spoon with the moon

she stepped on

like one small step for man,

one giant leap for mankind.

In the disinfected Petrie dishs

of the microcosmic lenses of our one-eyed seeing

a child trembles in toxic shock

like an incurably observable disease.

And all the lies come true in spin and print

and all the roses of blood and beauty

are tainted with dewdrops

that smear the mirrors

we hold up to our own self-natures

like the tears of shape-shifting worms.

And the new mondo of enlightenment is

no matter how the fortune-cookie breaks

it takes a seasoned liar to recover from the truth

by sloughing the skins of his sins

like cosmic snakes and condoms on the moon

cast away like the used rubbers of his regenerative mistakes

and as always among these unclean finger-pointers

when their dicks go limp,

the first stone in the hand of the last chimp.

The reek of their righteousness

is an inert gas

in the Etruscan linear B

of the neon marquee of a sleazy hotel

where even the clock cheats on the bell

that signs you in

with the wry smile of an empty wallet

that doesn’t kiss and tell.

For political reasons hypocrisy prays

for a world that it’s abused for so long

even its cries for help

have turned into unholy cliches.

Lizard-brained hatred so cold.

So many swine-hearted Herods

still leaning over their cribs

to murder them in their sleep

like dream-seeking militia in the night

or the whistling missiles of American might

surely the children of the world have learned by now

they’re wholly and solely disposable.

Surely we’ve taught them

yesterday’s manger is today’s begging bowl

and for all the daisy chains and haloes of rain

we might have lavished

on the good soil of their innocent strawberry hearts,

today we drop thousands of anti-personnel mines from the air

to blow their petals off like body parts

without giving a shit

whether they love us or they love us not.

And surely they’ve noticed by now

given the millions that die each year,

whole Congos of the innocent,

that when St. Peter Moses or Muhammad

opens the gates of heaven

like a Sudanese refugee camp to let them in,

the key that turns the lock

is always an Ousi, an M-16, or an AK-47.

We’ve torn the new moon from the old moon’s arms

like a fanatic with a hammer

in front of Michelangelo’s Pieta.

And whatever lies you’ve been brought up to believe

to keep God up your sleeve

like a gun with a bell in a steeple,

whatever simulacrum or likeness of yourself

you mutter to like the echo of your own voice or don’t

as if you had a choice,

what kind of eyeless insanity is it

that proves its love of God by hating people?

In the name of what you believe.

In the image of what you conceive.

In the spirit of your passions.

In the genome of your bloodline.

In the memory of the senses

you’ve martyred to your thoughts.

In the light of your wisdom

and the nights of your unknowing

when you were a strawman

pieced together from the short ends

of drawn lots to see who would risk being you

when you stood alone like a holy tree in the lightning

and waited for clear signs

that you could be more than this.

In the shadow of the logo

of your obscene lovelessness.

In the depths of your demonic despair

everyone’s your peer and equal

when you’re as worthless as everyone else.

And even in the heights of your aspiration

where your runaway kites keep getting tangled in the powerlines

that burn them like bad notes in a musical loveletter

that never got as far as feathers,

o my mad brothers and sisters,

mutant progeny of the unforgiven,

video spawn of the bored and unlucky,

misspent lees of the wines of life

like the bloodstain of a miscarriage in a marriage bed,

cannibalistic corpse-muck in an Armani suit

shrieking for war like baby-food,

what have we done to the children

in our frenzy to feed on one another,

what have we done to their eyes,

their ears, their mouths, their noses,

their hands, their feet, their skin, their minds, their hearts, their souls?

Flesh of our flesh, blood of our blood, bone of our bone,

Eye of our eye and breath of our breath,

and the light by which we know the light

of the unimagineable worlds

that blossom into being.

Disinherited child of a death that was not your own

when one man’s scheme backfired in yours

like a dream you’ll never have again.

Child of horrors and sorrows and nightmares

that have outgrown your hand-me-downs

like the oilslick of a second skin

that fits you like an eclipse,

did you know you

even before you were born

you were already

an exile, a refugee, a casualty in the womb,

that there was a bomb under your crib

that was primed to go off

just as you were learning to walk,

just as you were learning to tie your shoes?

It’s as if all the children now on earth

were born too early for the future

we keep trying to correct for them

like the same prophetic mistake

as if the chapter and verse of our fate

were merely a spelling error,

and we could right the good life

in the Jonestowns of our hearts

by killing our children for their sake

in the name of a better start.

Geraniums of blood on plaster walls

where she carefully attended

the distress of her dolls.

And ghosts in the gravepits of her eyes

that know of abysses deeper than death

where no one’s ever gone with a camera.

 

PATRICK WHITE