TOO EASY TO HATE YOU WHOLESALE

TOO EASY TO HATE YOU WHOLESALE

 

Too easy to hate you wholesale.

I’d rather do it in little painful retail pieces.

My grandfather once chopped up a poisonous snake in Australia

that almost bit him

and threw it slice by slice all afternoon into a raging fire.

It’s not much of a hell for a fire-proof politician

but it’s better than that viral heaven

where you sing your own praises

like pamphleteers in a choir of cliche catch-phrases.

Pimped out in front of the microphone for the press

as if everything you say

were printed on Jensen highgloss like your hair

as you try to pull back hard

on the fifty pound test of your fibre-glass smile

trying to come off like Atlas with the world on your shoulders

when you and I both know

you’re just the seventh son of the seventh son

of William Tel

with another apple on your head,

hoping every arrow that’s pointed at you like the public

has got a suction cup on it as big as the baby’s butt

of your Solomonic face

trying to divide things with a sword

you pulled out of your own ass

like Excalibur from Merlin’s stone

or a white candle at a black mass.

I want to ask you, sincerely, without malice,

watching your body language like a puppet show

how often were you not laid in highschool

and is a tradition of sexual frustration

enough of a party platform to run on?

You say you want to represent me,

be my voice where voices have seldom gone before;

but you’re a retired engineer who thinks like a failing hardware store

and I’m still so spaced out like the sixties

from my last attempt to get out of here

without being followed through the night

by the prophetic stars of my afterlife

like the flashback of a bad hallucination,

I don’t think your limp candle of a Buddha

and the little it knows about darkness

is going to light much up.

You say you’re as common as a cafeteria coffee cup,

that you know just how it feels

to grow up like a tree without birds

as you flock to me in flightless barnyard words

as if everyone’s native tongue

were nothing but a grammar of egg-laying lies.

Let them eat cake.

And heads rolled like lettuce.

Or as the Ontario Minister of Human Resources once said

pruning welfare cheques as a hedge against inflation

like budgets in the gardens of the Palace of Versailles

Let them eat bannas and peanut butter all month long

though he wouldn’t eat his own advice

because he made a fat living being the man

in charge of suffering.

He squeezed humans over his rice.

You want to stand up for people you’ve never met

like a good ventriloquist

who’s learned how to throw his voice around

as we all dummy up to your laptop

like sheeple around a shepherd

as if you were the last echo of the first word.

Let there be lies.

I may be trying to keep faith

with the loss of my faith in religion

hoping space is still faster than the spotlight

you keep burning in the godless windows

of the church of the Immaculate Decision

to cape yourself in another crusade

and patched like a one-percenter Templar biker on tour in the Holy Land

liberate Jerusalem from infidels like me

by plucking the thorns from the rose

like shark fins from the sea for terrorist soup.

And how can you know humans

that are more human than you are

by looking at them through

the pixellated fly’s eye of a flat screen tv

as if you were the third eye of Leonardo da Vinci

talking backwards like a mirror about things

as you dipiliate your own self-portrait

like the god in the machine on stage

well out of the reach of the groundlings?

And there you are all dolled up in the flag

like a political crossdresser

with so many roles in your wardrobe 

all the cosmetic chameleons died of shame a long time ago

trying to keep up with all that lampblack mascara

you lavish like soot and newsprint spin

on the eyes of all your peacock rainbows

trying to convince me you’re just a regular guy

with your thumb up the ass of your apple piety

like hamburgers and racism and football.

There should be a boardwalk for politicians

who think like mannequins

and walk awkwardly like models in high heels

trying to show off the newest line of their party’s designer ideals.

But I’m not like you at all.

I don’t want to stand beside a sick child’s bed

like a piece of legislation

and watch her die of things I can cure.

I don’t hate whales and wolves and people and trees.

I don’t gnaw on the bones of evolutionary contention

like a developer in the jungles of the Amazon

bulldozing down trees like tiny bronchioles

in the lungs of the planet

to make more room to breathe commercially

or unmarrowing life of its cowering species

by burning the earth into real-estate

or the lifeline of a highway

with a toad crossing and a toll gate.

I don’t think people on welfare are economic parasites

living off your eyelashes like microscopic cattle for free.

I don’t think people should carry guns

into church into school into bars into work

as easily as they pack their lunch.

I got well laid in highschool.

Gratified desire makes for a more generous spirit

and a kind of human empathy you don’t seem to understand

as if every human you ever met

were wearing the same spiritual skin

and their suffering

made you and them beautiful

everytime you reached out to touch it

like the harp and the rose of a new tatoo.

I don’t think the polls you conduct

like dour Roman augurs

playing with their livers and birds

to know the mind of god

like the snakey percentiles of Delphi,

can give you a clue as to what it means

to be so fucked over for so long by people like you

who have wiped them off your shoe

on a patch of public grass

like something you stepped in

the little choo choo that knew it could knew it could knew it could

up and down the modelled hills of your toy train in the basement

isn’t the same as the private chant

of a shattered man in the looking glass

that shows him in the attic of Heartbreak Hotel

repeating to his own reflection

I will not be pathetic

I will not be pathetic

I will not be pathetic

as if he were running his own private underfinanced election

like Sisyphus up the hill of his incumbent brain.

Evolution must have lost its sense of humour

when it created you

out of the scraps of everyone else

that went into the dismembered stew of Marduk

like Tiamat and Kingu

to serve your coporate idols

the human muck you’ve made of our children

in the maw of Baal

who serves us all like Exxon.

And now you say no to women

because they said no to you.

But why should there be fewer zoning laws

in the suburbs of your six inches of dick

than there are in the mismanaged slums

you made a fortune from

like infinite riches in the little rooms

you want to regulate like women’s wombs?

You’re into bondage.

The legislation you espouse

is a kind of S&M.

Maybe your mother beat you

with a vacuum cleaner pipe when you were young

for jumping on the couch

and now you see her in all women

and you hate them

and that hate seeks power to control

as you do that dick-whipped mouse of a wife

that stands beside you

like a mismatched accessory to your tie

the power of life that eludes you.

But you’d kill any number of children,

squander any amount of the public’s money

anywhere anytime on the drop of a drone

if it served to secure the national interests

of a personal agenda of your own.

There are a lot of people not like you.

There are a lot of people who don’t kill people

like drug companies or insurance adjusters

who look upon their suffering

like a Vatican of pain

selling their snake-oil salvation to superstitious slaves

as if Jesus could forgive whatever you did for gain,

as their greatest, natural, renewable resource.

There are people who don’t speak for God

like a pale rider on a white horse

or a politician high on himself

like a small worm in the multi-foliate rose

of his slow corrupting rise from orifice to office.

There are a lot of people

who don’t want to own the rain the grain the air

the moon the oil the gold the gene the disease or the cure;

they don’t want to put their brand on the brain

like a tumour of material success;

they don’t want to ride in a limousine

like a golden chariot through a slum

as if the king and the kingdom had finally come

like a bulldozer to a ghetto of old rezoning laws

and heaven could now come down to earth

and the prophecy be fulfilled everywhere in shopping malls

there’s no eye of a needle so small

or camel so large

you can’t lead a consumer through it by the nose

into an artificial paradise of credit and debt

where the cynical angels are feathered in cash

like a good bet on a bad horse.

I’m a face-reader.

Yours is pornographic trash.

And looking deeper like a mind-reader into your thoughts

and the shit you fake as your feelings,

your inner eye is an Arctic cataract

and your soul is a nasty diaper rash.

And in your next life you’re coming back

as a homeless man on a heating grate,

a runaway hooker bruised by West Van,

a pregnant mother with you for a slumlord,

a dead hockey player brought back from Afghanistan

where his blood still stains the sand like oil

to a homely funeral just outside of Edmonton

to do his time in the penalty box of his native soil.

You’ll see what it’s like to be an Ojibway in jail,

a black man in a holding cell in Syracuse,

a Somali immigrant beaten to death

in the studio of a privatized detention center

that breaks the news like a racist snuff flick

that doesn’t make anyone sick.

And because your soul is a partisan misinfomercial

about who threw the acid in the face of the moon

and who’s going to pay for the facial,

you will spend eternity in the emergency waiting room

of an overbooked hospital

that doesn’t even know you’re dead

and suffer every injury and ill that’s wheeled through the door

as if it were your own urgency

that everyone ignored

because you were Hispanic and old and poor.

You’ll eat the bitter black bread

that’s baked from the crumbs of your dreams

when you wake in the ghettoes of night

to the sound of gunfire sirens and screams

like the bedtime stories with heart-crushing themes

you made up like laws with draconian claws

to keep everything just the way it seems.

You will watch your mother die alone on a hospital gurney

parked for hours in the hall

like a long unforgiving journey with no farewell.

And every step you take to try to escape

your progressive thresholds of pain,

hunger, squalor, disease, murdering police

the death squads of the softdrink companies and drug cartels

will turn into the virtual wall of a well-guarded border

that unspools like a snake scaled in coils of razor wire

you’ll waste your tears in vain to train to bite other people.

Scorned by the light as someone not to fall upon,

the steel stars of the hateful constellations

and all the lives you ever tore like roses

on the gory horns you once wore

as if you were a Viking slug of a sheriff in Albuquerque

hunting down aliens that threaten your obesity

with mouths to feed of their own

will sink their fangs into your illegal blood

like the nemetic thorns of all the refugee nations

you ever treated like Mexico.

And your heart will be towed

by red white and blue American tugboats

far away from the unwelcoming shores

of your flesh and blood

like a barge of surgical waste

dumped into a snakepit of spent syringes.

Narcissus sees himself in everything

but when he looks at his reflection in you

from the balcony of his pent-house view

even the mirror cringes.

You are not my leader.

I don’t follow you.

You’re not a tall ship

and a star to steer her by.

You’re just another flavour of pollution

spit out by the sea.

You’re just another pea

under an electoral pod

on the huckstering midway

of your snake-wielding exhibitionist god

making money off events

for a sleazy foundation of revivalist tents.

You’re the bad meat of the body politic

that gets dumped down our wells every night

like neighbourly corpses on cable tv.

You can’t even pick up a hooker

without getting caught

pinching your dick in your zipper

like an upright Christian family man

who went slumming in a pagan shrine

as you apologize in emotional Martian to the curious earthlings

waiting to catch a falling star and put it in their pocket

as if you were suffering in some moral gulag

for letting God and family and party

and your famous homophobic stand

against gay marriage down

as you swear on a gag-order of prominent lawyers

you’ll learn from the experience to become a better scumbag.

But I don’t want you working hard for me anywhere.

I don’t want you doing anything in my name

as if what serves you were one and the same bloodline

in the heart of a human and the heart of a leech.

Those that can, love. Those that can’t, preach.

But no one’s about to practise what you teach

in your pulpit, at your podium, in your steeple

as if you were the moral crutch of the crippled people

you’ve maimed enough to get them to believe in you so much

as the King of Centipedes with legs to spare

they crawl up the stairs on their hands and knees

for the ideological touch of your venomous extremeties

to prosthetize their fervent prayer

like ghosts at a seance on a local channel

or howdy-doodies of apocalyptic despair

humming in the high frequencies

of outraged bugs in the webs of a treacherous dreamcatcher.

No soul. No heart. No mind. No integrity. No shame.

Nothing but you standing with your hands on your hips

like one of the original gates of ignorance

deepening the darkness that underwhelms us from beneath

like the efforts of a mother at a public pool

trying to teach her children

to swim through all this quicksand

that was laid like the cornerstone of the promised land

by a grave-robber’s shovel in the hands of a vicious fool

who does unto others before they do unto him

like the iron rule of the missing limb

that dips the horn of the mythical unicorn

like the poisonous thorn of a bitter eunech

into the virgin waters of his backed-up public

like the closet-queen of  killer bees

tainting the honey of private hives

with placebos of money and venom

and anti-snake-oil serums

running like your political lives

down the last leg you’ve got to stand on.

You’re the embryo of a head of state

trying to lobby the rightwing reformists of fate

at the gates of the Alamo

overun by Mexico

and the human overflow

of your own abortive theorems

like bad seed in the unhappy harems

that prorogue you as you did them

like the dying breed

of a prophylactic creed

suspended like an STD

in the subcomittees of a parliamentary quorum.

And I can tell by the hair on your hands

you’ve got a firm command of the issues

trying to fit the sloughed skin of the usual snake

under the rosebush of the convential spin

like a compromised condom

to the medievel domestic policies

of a corporate Albertan oil sheikh

or the indecent liberties a prick will take

like a government on the make

with its hands down everyone’s pants

asking for a second chance at re-election

to advance the Viagra of the party-line

by running attack ads in prime time

to broadside Onan on the blind side

of another snap erection

just in case it slips out

you’re having an affair with yourself

it would be impossible to lie about

like an ingrown hair

like a skidmark in a tailored suit

like a black hole with the light on your face

like a celebrity scandal with its own disgrace

like that icky boy in highschool no one ever liked

three rows over and a moron or two

outside the bell-curve

humping his nose like a camel in heat.

Or to quote the mystic Hadani dancing like a carnelian

before the temple of her gods

in a trance of love and joy

that irked her chauvinist elders,

pundits of the mysterious,

who begged her to return to a life like you:

I have felt the swaying of the elephants shoulders underneath me

and now you want me to mount a jackass?

Try to be serious.

And I would add my loveletter

like a vote or a leaf in the fall:

Shove this up your ass

like a worm in a mushy apple

and when it comes to pass

that all that’s left is rotten

take a good look at the mess you’ve made of you

just before God sends out

an emergency health warning

to the roots of everything

there’s salmonella in the mindstream

you’re trying to palm off on the public

as the peaches-and-cream-scheme

of the nightmare you’ve been trying to spawn

since you first went pubic,

and you’re recalled

and you’re forgotten

and nothing lives on.

Like a bubble of bad gas

like dogshit on the grass

when the snow’s thawed

like a bill that didn’t pass

like a skunk that’s been declawed

by allegations of fraud

like the lies you pimped for God

by selling your own ass

to the pharmaceutical companies

like bad porn,

nothing lives on.

Your afterlife is stillborn.

You’re gone.

 

PATRICK WHITE