HAD ENOUGH

HAD ENOUGH

 

Had enough.

Had enough of nothing

and now it feels real.

You want to know how I feel

after six decades on earth

in a fifteen minute interview

about so many things

I know less than nothing about.

Death for example.

Or poetry life art suffering love

what it means to be a human

or who I am in all of this turmoil of being

that just seems to exist to exist

as everything eats to live to be hungry.

Are you a cannibal

if you eat your own body like life does?

Is it so hard to understand the death of children

when we squander so much on war

all over the planet

laying waste to our own womb

as if we were not born of woman?

Had enough of inconceivable suffering

being paged through like the news

and the horrors ending in the bathetic drivel

of pundits expressing their views

about things they know about

and do nothing

as I go about my daily business

feeling like a hypocrite in everything I do

because I know I could do more and haven’t

and probably won’t.

Had enough of watching the injustice of power

bleach the bloodstains out of its lily-white image

like snow on dogshit.

Like a Nazi investigation of atrocity.

Had enough of feeling guilty about the truth.

The few are always dying one by one

in the name of the many who don’t exist.

Had enough of compassion turning its open hand

into a fist

with savage indignation

at what it witnesses everyday

as the human condition.

One lie for all

in a voting booth

that takes a poll of the truth

it’s running against like a rumour

isn’t enough of a right

to guarantee our freedom from delusion.

Symbiosis is not the same as political collusion

and three mutants with a staff of spin-doctors

talking like weathervanes

trying to anticipate

the popular course of evolution

by running God against a monkey in a primary

on the creationist platform of an antedeluvian textbook

to appease the simians descended from man

with a more exalted outlook

on how they began

isn’t the stem-cell

of a new myth of origin

we can all agree upon

like the fossil of a face with a grin

up for re-election.

Anti-Darwinian simians

against unnatural selection.

Sometimes life rolls the genetic dice

looking to change her luck

and everything comes out snake-eyes.

 

PATRICK WHITE