SAFE, EDUCATED WITNESS
Safe, educated witness to bestial scenes
since I was born, the destruction of cities
and species, and helpless human beings
severed from their limbs like pruned branches
too close to the borders of warring powerlines,
whole families massacred like icons
in a video game by a real soldier
whose delusion wasn’t the same,
the blood-spatter of children
freaking the flower, I
loathe the indifference
of the one-eyed watchers
who look on impotently
like hardened gum
under their bomb-proof desks
weighing the risks for both sides
of unbalancing their covert genocides
like a second set of books of the dead.
Perverts blowing kisses like artillery shells
to children in their beds
who scream like murdered bells
and windfalls of deathheads,
billiard balls, and tiny skulls
that broke to start the game.
I thought I was a lucky man
to be born in the land of plenty,
and the cupboard is full
but my heart is an age beyond empty
and my spirit is savaged
by disgust and shame,
and under every pellucid, abstract thought,
laying itself down like money
at an ideological dogfight,
an abyss of bones
where the children rot
like the memory cards
of disconnected cellphones.
I listen to myself, I listen
to the distinguished commentators
and the primed-time spin doctors
passing out motorized walkers
like miracles for the mentally lame
and renewable treaties
for the kingdom to come
that fits over the head
of the planet now
like the used atmosphere
of a discharged condom.
Hell seems quaint by comparison
with the agony and the torment of here
where the natural, untaught decency of a human
is accosted by the atrocities
of a loveless heart
hooking the lives of children
on inverted question-marks
like flayed cattle in an avant-garde abbatoir of bad art
as everyone subscribes to the New York Times
to keep up with the latest alibis
to expurgate the mess
of regurgitated crimes
that aligns our vomit
to the wines of progress.
And everyone feels what they say
as if God sat in their corner
like a fool on a stool,
but no one ever says what they feel
when the heel crushes the head of a child
like a grape
and her sister is hauled away
like a voodoo doll at a gang rape.
Who caters the flesh feast
at these laden tables
of fat, old, impotent, girdled men
arriving in limousines
to discuss discussing a resolution
to put an end to a child’s screams?
Summoned like vampiric thorns
to the bloodbank of a rose
that bleeds like a child or the sea
everyone opposes saving the roses
until they can be arranged
like body parts and ashes
in the funeral vase of a policy
that crashes like a junkie
at the mention of withdrawal.
O mighty world
who eats the nations
like a pack of wild dogs a corpse,
necrophiliacs at a conference table
smearing make-up on the facts,
trying to turn their maggots into butterflies
by wrapping themselves in their flags
like the stars in the sky
and the waves of the sea
and squeezing the life
out of a child like striped toothpaste.
O vicious, pygmy abomination
you pricked your thumb
on the thorn of the crescent moon
when you reached out
to leech the blood of the rose
by crushing an army of four-year-olds.
O wild hog of runt-rage
goring the world
like a girl on your tusks,
it takes more than one star
to make a constellation
and a lot more than bloodshed
to school the eyes to see it
that look at you now
like children in terror,
the plinths of your shining,
sidereal teeth,
and the lonely myth
you drop like flyers over the city,
lip-service to a fraud without pity.
PATRICK WHITE
