PRIMA
NOCTIS
Of
human misery what’s left to tell
the
single bead of the moon
that
makes a lonely rosary of revolutions,
one
face always turned away
as
if it refused to look upon
its
own imploring features
in
the brutal, breathless, garish light of day,
or
those of the earth
reviewed
in the turning below?
I
am nothing, a man, a microbe on a skull
picked
clean by immaculate cannibals
whose
hands are greased with brains,
my
much vaunted, cultivated consciousness
and
sterling will, free, or spontaneously
predetermined,
the leaf of an afterthought
enhancing
my passion for light
and
periodic sentences.
Look
where you will
and
tell me this is evolution; tell me
this
is that continuum of used mutations
that
bricked the river clay of ancient Sumer
into
these ascending asylums of the absurd
to
burn our children in the fires of the stars
as
surely as Carthage ate hers,
poor
kids first, then the rich, as always,
civilization
nothing but musical chairs
in
the food chain, a game
of
I eat you; now you eat me, who
shall
be the grass, and who, the proudest of cows,
the
grazer. And the grass may turn into the grazer
and
the grazer into grass in transformative cycles
that
ripple out wonderfully like rain
to
rationalize this caste of food and feeder
and
make it holy, harmonious,
and
scientifically insane enough
to
appeal to the average reader,
the
red letter ‘A’ at the top of every genetic cliche
that’s
still convinced of angels in the abattoir,
growth
on this planet
nothing
but the pace of murder, government
a
blood-bank run by vampires intent
on
the deregulation
and
sanctification of their fangs, the sanguine order,
the
cherished symmetries of our bacterial histories
nothing
but the victory bells
calibrating
the advance of slaughter. And paintings
of
the gouty apes and their bedizened concubines,
and
poems that only the affluent can write,
and
all the cathedrals, mausoleums, and pillars that enhance
the
hills of blood-soaked soil we build on,
all
the refinements of culture, all
the
opiates of erudition, the ineffectually coherent overviews
of
the chaos of bones we throw before us
like
men and women and children
to
allay the superstitions of the future
that
demands of us now nothing less
than
the last born of our own unrequited extinction,
will
not do to decorate the birthday jest
and
excuse with elaborate rococo icing
nuclear
candles all over the blood-cake of the planet.
If
liberty means I have the right to own the rain
of
another country; if health and happiness depend
upon
designer genocides that race
the
minds and hearts of the heartless, mindless mob
with
toxic logos and lethal codicils, if wisdom and art
are
only the crusted, rotten, riddled pylons
on
a wharf of indulgent departures
in
a sea of blood and fury, the idiotic squall
of
the ship’s horn as it pilots out of harbor,
the
advance defection of hurricane roses
believing
the false hilarity of a doomed love cruise
and
there is no lifeboat in the bruise of their beauty,
then
we’re only licking the eloquence out of our own wombs
and
mouthing platitudes like cleavers in a butcher-shop,
masters
of dismemberment;
we’re
just another evil dream that no one will remember.
And
no one will recall what a morning it was once
just
to wake up; and all that we have cherished
will
be desecrated in a conflagration of black fire
because
twenty-five million children die of starvation a year
and
the fact is the small fret of an obscure poem
that
will turn and destroy you
in
a word from the eyes of a disgusted messiah.
If
the pursuit of knowledge is a regression backwards
through
the hallowed slimes of evolution,
and
flesh and blood and bone, the jellies of our eyes,
are
now more alien than the foundation stones
of
the pyramidal corporations erected by slavers and thieves
to
own every square inch of the planet’s afterlife,
inflated
market shares in the global necropolis
that
grows in the grave like fingernails and hair, then
how
can we not be refuted by our own prescience
and
perish in the cyanotic blue moonrise
of
our own catastrophe coming true
when
we saw, we knew, we ignored
the
glacial cracks in our spacious palace of mirrors
and
the rips in the knees of our emaciate atmospheres
and
went on chancing the planet like a week-end casino?
We’re
just another inept species under the bell-jar
of
the writing on the wall that no one remembers how to read
as
we exterminate ourselves in radioactive ferocities of greed,
dead
as yesterday’s headline in the instant that we breed.
There
are nations on their knees being whipped to death
by
their own umbilical cords
in the evangelic hands of missionary markets
and
there are nations that vie for the lion’s place
in
the imperial trend of the stable atrocities
that
guarantee that children will bleed
to
cleanse the wound and fatten the gland of a dividend.
The
corporate wasp lays its egg on the forehead
of
the living host and butterflies
are
cancelled like bad cheques,
nations
are gutted from the inside out,
and
the experts defend the economic dialectics
of
flexing their hex of hysterical democracy
over
the bent necks of experimental derelicts
labouring
in a labyrinth of lab rats and executive acts.
Among
the swans and soirees of the prosperous assassins
the
insiders trade in subtle abortions
and
panicked climacterics of erotic stock
that
convulse the planet with toxic shock
as
their dicks erect with capital and war
violate
the wind, the water, the oil, the ore
until
the rapacity of their lust is satiate with scandal
and
peace is mentioned, justice, human dignity
and
they pull out in a hurry, limp with virtue,
and
from the pulpits of the puppet press
dry
clean the torn dress, the stained flag,
with
the bleaches and fabric softeners
of
their laundered confessions and laissez-faire digressions
on
market pressures and open trade relations
with
the third-world brides of the first night
that
are torn from their husband’s arms
and
subject to palatial abominations,
exploited
like a resource, their wombs battered into sterility,
must
learn to comply with capital’s amorous charms
among
the ruined nuns and nations
labouring
under the weight of corporate virility
voyeuristic eunuchs in the fiscal shadows,
and skeletal children thinner than keys,
still
stunted in the filthy chimneys
of
the captains of commerce, the Molochs of money
quoting
chapter and verse of their logo genetics
to
feed another generation to their corporate creed,
a
labour camp for orphaned amputees,
severities
of people on their knees,
cut
like a budget.
PATRICK
WHITE
