WHAT A SAD, VIOLENT LITTLE SHIT
What a sad, violent little shit you’ve become
now that your crackin.
You talk like Michaelangelo in a quarry
selecting Carrara marble
for the translucency of its alluvial veins,
and you talk about painting with feeling,
but it’s hard to get anything done
when you’re just another Tom Thumb
crushed under a tiny avalanche of rocks
so all you ever really do
is prime the ceiling white
over and over again like a sail
when there’s not much of a wind.
I watch you trying to think,
ferocious with thought,
and it’s like watching a ball
jumping around
trying to pick up its own jacks
like the stars of the razorwire constellations
that dance like a hareem of mean angels
on the head of your pin.
Only a real prick
can scare the needle,
and little brother,
you’re not even that
under all your washaway tats
as you run like a watercolour
in the acid rain of that battery brain
you’re wired to.
Once you were full of doubt and indirection,
you didn’t know who you were
and there were tears
for other people’s sorrows
that wept like candles in elegant chandliers
and a tolerance for the folly of others
that excused your own
that made you seem
at the unlikeliest of times
compassionate and wise.
You were vulnerable.
You could be hurt,
betrayed, rejected,
and I saw in your eyes
that you had no answer for anything
when she left you like a lighthouse
without any warning.
But at least you had the courage of the morning
to get up again and zombie your way
through the rest of the day
as if Lazarus wasn’t a lie.
Now you’re all severities
of radical rock
like a mad dog
biting at its own heart
as if it were an ulcer.
And every second acephalic thought
falls like a head into the breadbasket
at the foot of the guillotine
that makes everyone edgy
about what you truly mean
when you introduce your girlfriend
like a pampered queen,
a trophy butterfly
in the plagiarized web
of an award-winning spider.
You love her like a miner
at a cocktail party
with an ice-pick,
but later when she thaws
she will stab you in the bath like Marat.
Love for you isn’t about
joy or pleasure or children,
not the hive, nor the honey.
It’s the engine
of a fanatical rampage
that fires you up
like a killer bee
to swarm any form of life
that isn’t you in the shopping mall
like a bad tatoo
that can’t make an indelible impression
on anyone
trying to have a gang life
that doesn’t bang around like you
when you sport your true colours like your girlfriend,
tricked out in black and blue
and patched with bruises
where she shoots what she uses of you
like the last crumb in the eye of a dream
you cooked in a spoon without eyelids.
Little brother, don’t come back.
Don’t sit at my table, don’t
greet me when I pass.
You’re just another scream
on fastforward, you’re
just another improvised explosive device, an i.e.d.
buried in the road you’re on
like a heart attack
waiting to happen
like Iraq to an amputee.
If once it was hard
to take the measure
of what you could have been,
like a new energy policy
that insisted on being clean,
now you’re as easy to understand
as Chernobyl or an oilslick.
You’re a spiritual polluter,
a dirty needle, just
another chrome-plated dipstick
in a motor-mouth
that runs on mystic gangrene.
PATRICK WHITE
