VAIN IDIOTLOGS

VAIN IDIOTLOGS

 

Vain idiotlogs in squirmy smiles

and miles of opinionated ties.

Pudgy party toads squatting

on lilypad platforms rooted in the muck.

Hypocrites.

Liars.

Gluttons.

And the viciously ignorant.

Voces populi.

The voices of the people

embodied in corrupt men

like birds in a fireplace chimney.

The voices of the people

unspooling eclipses of lies

that smother their words in oil

like the Exxon Valdez.

Juvenile geriatric ferocities

that have run out of patience

with the protocols of decency.

Look at their faces.

Cantankerous old men

looking for a use for themselves in life

like barbed wire and bleach.

Arsonists in a volunteer fire-brigade

throwing matches out the window

of an obsolete Martin Mars waterbomber

to give themselves something to put out

like Empedocles on Aetna.

For years I’ve listened

to these fascist clowns

being interviewed like tumours on tv

to see if they’re benign or malignant.

They pour themselves out

like Niagaras of iodine

into every wounded issue

that falls down and scrapes its knees.

Their cures are contemporaneously racist

but long ago they liberated the disease

like the ceo’s of global companies

calling for free market economies

to tear down their natural immunities

to a parasite that claims it eats symbiotically.

Leaders of men.

Leaders of women and children.

Leaders of the mute and helpless.

North stars of the unchosen people

for whom no seas part to let them pass.

Blinded by their own blazing

they shine like the stars of a new constellation

bent on cleaning up the slums of the zodiac

but they’re still the same old spiders in the cosmic web

spinning the dark matter of the masses

out of their bulbous asses.

Hatred grows as reasonable as a snake

in a nest of baby crows.

And the emperor is dressed

in common clothes

like a rose

slumming among the weeds

crowding the perimeters of the garden

they’re never allowed in

like another heartworm up for re-election.

Like any infection when it takes a stand

they claim the doctor

can’t cure the disease

unless he has it

and in the name of spreading the word

they never wash their hands.

Rabies running a primary against water.

Hydrophobic oases in desert sands

where every revelation’s the mirage

of an experienced snakepit

that fell like manna from heaven

misleading the caravan

along the Perfume Trail to the Promised Land

like the Platonic ideal of a democratic newsreel

with a real feel for Egypt.

The text might be archetypically abstract

but the footnotes

are written in the blood of people

who never learned how to read

and however you spin the writing on the wall

it’s the graffitti under the spray-bombed bridge

that reveals their tragically anonymous fates

not the monograms on the dinner plates

that are laid out like harvest moons

for the tapeworms of state

who celebrate themselves

like infinite boons in banquet rooms for all of us.

They also serve who only stand and wait

but it’s getting late

and everyone wants to go home

like a desparate nation

to a refugee camp in foreclosure

where the landlords of life

with a marketshare in evolution

read Adam Smith

and practise infantile exposure.

One self-serving maggot of a man

when he hatches out of his own filth

can lay enough legislative eggs

on the forehead of its electoral host

the eyes of innocent children

can’t see the stars

through the flies that swarm them

as if Beelzebub had become a creator

and genesis read like genocide.

And it doesn’t matter

how hard it snows

on the political domes

of our subservient masters

to purify the outcome of the issue

the heat of the dungheaps underneath

burns their Arctic ice-cap down

everytime they let out a breath

like a gas of global warming.

Choirs of sirens have learned to sing

like lighthouses without a warning

along the dangerous coasts

of another red-eyed morning.

The foghorns call us to the rocks

like the pterodactylic dying call

of the last species of dinosaur

stoned out of existence

by the mobs of those without sin. 

Rats gnaw the flute of the Pied Piper

who lost his way out of Hamlin

and turned around like the Black Plague.

Gulliver’s bound in a straitjacket of Lilliputions.

And government’s the cult leader

of the analectic Confucians

who keep exact records

of the murders next door

like the ancestral bloodlines

of praeturnatural planets

hooked on bad astrologers.

The fixed stars roll like loaded dice

across the darkling glass

and one-eyed Cylopean skies

of our glacial cataracts

as if everything in existence

had a secret agenda

it’s clinging to like a stolen identity

waiting to show its face

like a rattlesnake under a rosebush

that talks in tongues to a spirit of thorns.

No matter how many eagles they eat

they’ll never learn to fly

and when they look to the sky

to point themselves out

like a constellation

brighter than the rest

the stars quickly get their nebulars together

and shine like false magi

on the afterbirth

of all these maggots with horns

trying to put a new spin

on the corpse of a dead myth

that reeks like a hieroglyph

just leaked to the press

about how we got into this mess.

PATRICK WHITE