I WANT DARK ENERGY

I WANT DARK ENERGY

I want dark energy.

I want release.

I want riot.

I want wishing wells

too surfeited with the prayers of the undeserving

to haemorrhage like watersheds

thrown from the balcony of the theatre

like plastic hysterectomies onto the anointed heads

of my immaculate conceptions

of blue madonnas in the audience.

I want tantrum.

I want chaos.

I want nemesis.

I want pandemonium.

I want a black mass

where the wafer of blood and flesh

isn’t a cookie on my tongue

that wasn’t burnt in the oven

but celebrates my suffering

in a holy communion of razor blades.

I want freaks with distractive affinities for the implausible

to rat their hard drives out to the police

like copycat serial killers

downloading corpses

like a motherboard at a seance

channeling the voices of virtual reality

into a living host.

I want the anti-muse of fire

to stuff my mouth with the ashes of urns

that weren’t inspired by their own negativity

to let the medium eat the message of the people

like a government dedicated to its own preservation.

I want to spit out toxic lyrics

like a cobra in disgust

at what it’s expected to swallow

like the sound-bite of a happier fatter afterlife.

I want heretical stigmata

to make the sign of the cross

like the blade of a Swiss army knife

to suck the poison out

and spit it back into the eyes of the Taliban.

I want foreign advisors

to parachute into my third world emotional life

like a snake pit they’re training to bite other people.

I want enlightened voodoo dolls

with boundless sex appeal

to reverse the curse of the blessing

that lied to me about who it was from.

Empty the slums the jails the ghettoes

the asylums the low rent housing projects.

Undo the first and last crescents of the moon like handcuffs

and free the beautiful lunatics

from their straitjackets and meds

to do post-doctoral research

into the genius of the stone-age tribes of Borneo

who knew how to shrink heads long before Freud

went into a trance and started playing witchdoctor

to a cauldron of biochemicals that can’t dance

like sugar plum fairies.

These are not the nabobs of madness.

The wrong miscreants have been committed

into the care of worse deviants.

Justice is an economic condition

that depends upon the law of supply and demand.

Build a prison.

And they’ll come

because nature abhors a vacuum

more than a black hole of economic isolation

with the singularity of a contagious victim

trying to tunnel through the bottom

like a drug cartel into the black market of another universe.

I want to reverse the order of things

like a digital hourglass

whose moment has come at last

to stand the pyramids on their heads

like the reflections of moonboats

capsized in a sea of sand

whose cargo sinks to the bottom

like the trickle down economics of an afterlife

that’s leaking down the leg of a drunk

in an executive urinal

dreaming of sweeter intoxications to come.

If what they tell me is true

and the tree of life is rooted in heaven

then it’s time we all started raining up

and shining from below

as if we were walking on stars

instead of rooting like thermophilic bacteria

seven kilometres down in a diamond mine

ready to regenerate life on earth by default

after an astronomical catastrophe

or being harvested

by corporate blue whales like krill.

Road kill like refugees

all along the panicked highways to hell.

I want an antidote

to the spiritual syphilis

that afflicts the human imagination with false hope

like snakeoil salesmen

milking the fang for a sure cure

to the other one that kills you

by convincing you to humbly bend over

and faithfully take it up the ass

like a syringe full of immunity to asps.

Disgorge the black honey

in the hives of the killer bees

and spread oilslicks like molasses

on their daily bread and butter

on the waters of their life

on the air they breathe.

For all the folksy spin

of their hand-painted commercials

consider how difficult it must be for them

to renew their virginity like a brand name

in the same public facility everyone else uses

without getting caught

fouling the earth like a toilet in an executive bathroom.

Monostomes that shit out of the same mouth they eat with.

Bring on the bitter the ugly the outrageous.

Bring on the doomsayers

who wish upon the first star they see at night

to be vindicated like a Mayan air raid siren

for howling like a banshee at the prophetic window

of another astronomical catastrophe.

Bring on the mythic inflations

of the apocalyptically hysterical.

Bring on the species we raised

like an assassin in our own house

to replace us with the same relentless indifference

that we showed to those that no longer exist.

Bring on the nightmares of feudal despair.

Bring on the extortionist thugs

of privatized health care

withholding the drugs

of a cancer patient for ransom

like dealers hooking junkies up to a higher price

knowing they’ve just got to have it or else.

Bring on the media pundits come

like scar tissue and rational bandages

with antiseptics on the tip of their tongues

to doctor the spin on the wounded psyche

of a disease they’re carrying

like the story of themselves.

Bring on the medicated luxury

of being able to feel something

with varying points of view

where tolerance too often

is just another norm of indifference

in the comfort of your living room

the one message the one headline

the news carries every night

like an after dinner mint

when one half of our global brain

watches the other half slaughtered or starved to death

raped enslaved kidnapped and decapitated

or swept like collateral damage under the monuments

to the lies we like to tell like modern history

about why so many had to die

so we could feel as special

as an NBC documentary on a national holiday.

The one mantra that’s being subliminally repeated

even if you go off to bed

disgusted at the obscenity

of any average day on earth

and take a soporific

to just tune out

and get a good night’s sleep

and wake up as refreshed as a web page

is keep things the way they are

because isn’t it good to live

in the shadow of the

biggest brother on the block

and look at the world as if you were exempt

when all was said and done to everyone else but you?

Most people aren’t looking for freedom anymore.

They’re looking for exemption.

And if you ever do see someone these days

out in the open as if the sixties weren’t over

nine times out of ten

unhinged by their perceptions

they’re looking for a good strong door

that keeps everything out and nothing in.

Bring on Armageddon.

Bring on the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

Bring on Adajal the red-haired one-eyed Liar.

Loose the Goog and the Magoog from behind their iron wall.

Let the shepherds of the black camel

build tall buildings in the desert.

Let no birds sing in the eucalyptus trees of Israel.

Let the last man on earth

grovel in the dust at his sister’s feet.

Let the extreme chaos of conditioned consciousness

load their hadron colliders with anti-matter

and have it out like gunslingers

in the streets of Laredo

as if an expanding universe

weren’t big enough for the two of them.

Here comes Alaric in the year 410 anno domino

with his Visigoths to the pantry of Rome.

Here comes Hulagu and his Mongols

and the black plague of 1348 anno domino

and the danse macabre of the flagellant fanatics

who tar and feather the night like a black swan

they set afire to keep the ugly ducklings in line.

Here comes the gamma radiation

like a starburst flavour in a wad of gum.

Bring on nuclear winter to savage the flowers

the grass the trees like a black sheep of seasons

that crept in among the flocks

like the shepherd of wolves

in the Duc d’Berry’s Book of Hours.

Let the earth put its big toe

on the last crescent of the moon

and pull it like the trigger of a double-barrelled shotgun

it’s got stuck like a mantra in its mouth

like the red hot ball of a koan of doubt

that’s been eating it from the inside out

and is about to break through

to other side of enlightenment

with the meteoritic impact of the Late Cretaceous

upon the chances of new mutant life forms

adapting to the desecration of the womb

that miscarried them into life

without a myth of origin

to explain their devolution from us

who took up all the oxygen in the room.

I want a more merciful chaos

than the relentless drone

of this blood-sucking order of doom

that plants its cosmic egg upon your forehead

and eats the butterfly out of the caterpillar

before it’s had a chance to bloom.

I want leaderless spaces

where everyone can move freely

wherever they want

with no back or front to the line

when everyone’s on a wavelength of their own

multiverse by multiverse

No more derisible politicians

with the integrity of fire hydrants

running for election

that any dog with money can piss on

in a house that’s already burnt to the ground.

You let me have a casino here

I’ll let you do cancer research over there.

I want to announce last call to all awareness

if the only thing we’ve figured out to do with it

is abuse it by arguing over whether

this obscenity of human lovelessness

is petty or profound

when the heart doesn’t bleed out

it haemorrhages before the last act of atrocity

has been played out in the belly of the beast.

The number of the beast

is the number of a man.

Could have been Decius.

Could have been Nero.

I want an infinite number of zeroes

behind my name.

What’s so scary about 666

in a triple X society five times as bad

and twenty-two times as mad

than Caligula making his horse a senator?

Let Rome burn.

Is Paris burning?

Has Beijing caught fire yet

like a red book in a cultural revolution?

I want dark skies in the eyes of my skull.

I want everything to go missing.

I want to fulfill my creative potential

like an unlit candle at a Zen funeral

that expresses everything I don’t know

about poetry and life

like an eloquent ignorance

that’s sensitive to light.

In a world as radioactively irrational as this

I want to be wrong for all the right reasons.

I want to play musical chairs with the seasons

and be the one that’s left out.

I want a medium with no message

it can identify with like the stem cell of a word.

I want to fall toward paradise

from such a long way up

I’m sure to burn out in the upper atmosphere

like a snowflake on a furnace

long before I ever get there.

Let someone unworthier than I am

take my place.

I want the cool background bliss

of my liberation

to put the cosmic hiss of my creation out

like a flickering candle

with a snake’s tongue

witching the air for the direction of prayer

between my godly forefinger

and my prehensile opposable thumb.

PATRICK WHITE