BITTER

BITTER

Bitter, bitter, bitter, the taste of men and the curdled perfumes

of their women putting on weight like the moon

and the gaudy hopelessness of their ejaculant children

living in the extinct carapace of a condemned volcano; bitter the lies

they whisper in sleep in dreams to the gods they keep

like spare rooms with skeleton keys

to their public coffins and closets. And bitter the nightwind

that vipers over the schooled sands of their cities

looming a harp of astringent acids into the whole cloth

of a funeral shroud, a body bag to contain the miscreance of their music.

Face after face after face, among orchards, planets, waves,

how many come to fruition, how many fall from ripeness

in unknown places, elicit arms, looking up into the sun that wined them

and sent them away without tears, mysterious sugars

in the fleets of their heart, and seeds, and green

superstitious stars tangled in the lifelines of their unmooring,

to unknown exorcisms on barbarous shores that fear them?

Their blood unspooled like a ribbon for a gift

they never gave, their blood, a scarlet noose of spectral chromosomes

slumped across a bough on the tree of their bitter knowledge

to lynch the lean thief and the ardent stranger

to the rigorous sorrows of their vaporous lustrations; bitter the fate

of the poor as they wait in a traffic jam of genes for the lights to change,

and bitter the restless, blood-drenched soil that receives them

like an embassy overwhelmed by the emergency of their arrival.

Are the paupers of dawn brighter in the root than in the flower,

is there no gentleness left in the flaring poppy to console them,

no milk that isn’t soured, no crumb of light in the pantry

to redeem the crushed heartscapes of a disinfected dream?

Bitter the monstrous sterilities of affluence

that dance on their graves like shovels full of deranged stars

elated by a fate unworthy of their shining, and bitter the church

they pearl around the lie of their filth

to convince the maggot of wings. That song is dead in the mouths of men,

that song is rock that once transformed the desert into roses

and gathered eyes like bees, like poets to their unfolding,

and bitter the aftermath of forgeries that heed the call

but will not answer the singer in the well

hoarse with mysteries in supple tongues

that confound the fallen towers with echoes, thieves, and voiceless birds.

And bitter to know this, bitter to say this, bitter

to discover this truth on the wrecked shores of the heart

the corpse of a beached dolphin suffocating under its own dead weight,

betrayed by the Judas-needle of too many messianic norths.

And there shall be no respite from the pettiness

of the enflamed parasite grown fanatical with the consumption of power,

no grace in the waltz of the tide that wears its gown of oil

like bitter weeds and formic nettles to a funeral ball

celebrating the providential death of excellence, no refuge

from the scorching wind that burns the eyes like glass

and welds a race of thorns to every planetary heart

ballistically deposed from the throne of peace where it once governed itself,

infused with the brilliance of a billion inquisitive stars

in the hidden court of the red mandarin

choosing his words like fireflies from the glowing honey of his lantern.

Bitter the stones of exile that once had a pulse; and bitter

the reek of numbers in the pores of our skin

that inform the wind of the approach of the faceless death

of a species blandly annihilated by its own generative toxins.

Where truth is a waste, a garbage-barge, and compassion

an old morality play doomed to an iron simplicity of outcomes,

the clarity of the vivid waters of life tinctured

by the mysterious bliss of the moon

grown infernal with the exudium of priestly acids

that mutate the grotesque ores of the contemporary mind

into reflexive arsenals that bark like junkyard dogs

behind the razor-wire of their impending intent, bitter, bitter, bitter

the snarling isolation, the wary silence of the hunted and condemned.

Our children the convulsion of our own contamination,

the wisdom of the old rotting on the docks of their delayed departure like wheat,

the futile shrines of the spirit desecrated

by the godless holy wars of bureaucratized science

elaborating the norms of death even as it decrys

the astronomical fluke of life against the odds of happenstance,

bitter the view that grimes the seer with faltering lamps

that black the clear day in their dying with the sulphides, scabs and cataracts

that occlude the light with the clustering flies,

the cloaking demons and starless nights

of the myriad immutable facts that enforce themselves like curfews on the vision;

bitter the darkness in the heart that tars the valiant greens

of spurned hopes that want to keep faith with the rain and the sky,

and bitter the schools in the refugee camps of the mind

where the sewers of thought run like open sores

into the tainted watersheds that defile the septic muses.

PATRICK WHITE