SIEGE-SKULL MINDS

SIEGE-SKULL MINDS

Siege-skull minds fortified

like hill top forts

in the New Middle Ages

of corporate feudalism

when everybody’s spiritual life

was then as now,

a kind of espionage.

Spying. Not seeking.

Not risking your own threshold

like a rung on a ladder

you might fall through

going to your own rescue.

I see the white-gold of human nature,

and the gold leaf of the gilded wheat

crawling back into the dark ore

of their myth of origin.

I see Monsanto

trying to sue Virgo

for the genetically altered

ear of wheat in her hand

while thousands of Indian farmers

commit suicide in their seedless fields

in the colonizing shadow of a patent

on the autumn equinox.

They ploughed and sowed the moon

and reaped an eclipse of bitter bread

they broke with the dead

who had nothing to be thankful for.

And there are corporate crusades

against the bees and butterflies as well

for copyright infraction

and companies that own the measles

and since corporations have become people

they’ve assumed the divine right of kings

to monopolize the sale of cancer

on the open market like the king’s touch

was once believed to cure scrofula.

Now the healers

must save up for the disease

before they can cure it.

I can see the surrealistic catastrophe

of human ownership

crushing the life out of a sparrow

caught in the windpipe of the world

like an archaic word for tomorrow.

I can see how the mirage of virtual reality

in this holographic desert of nanochips,

the universe injected into every one of them,

like a mind-altering meme,

is more mesmerizing to people

enchanted by the veils and screening myths

of factual delusion

than the real water they’re up to their keyboards in.

And just as Francis Thompson’s angels

keep their ancient places

under the hard stones of the world

disguised as death masks with human faces,

I can still see the eyes

of the most profound truths

behind the pebbles of our most obvious lies,

and shadows out in the hall

slipping secret messages

like encrypted intimacies of light

under the door of a dark room.

And even if you can read

the writing on the wall

with one hand alternately

covering one eye

and then the other

that’s doesn’t mean

your third eye isn’t illiterate.

Just because you passed an eye-test

at both ends of the telescope

with flying colours,

doesn’t mean

you didn’t walk out of the observatory

like a star-nosed mole blind and brain-washed

into believing a planetarium

where no birds fly

and no wind blows

and the wildflowers don’t put down roots

and no seed has ever opened its eyes

and taken a good look

is a substitute better than stars.

Real wounds with plastic scars.

The full moon with breast implants.

So no one’s inconvenienced by experience.

Ask any defence contractor

why woodpeckers are the war birds of Mars

and he immediately answer like a jack hammer

working the fault-lines on your skull

like continental plates on the moon

or the borders of countries on a global scale

as if you didn’t own

the mineral rights to your mind.

I can see the stars riding

the flying carpets of the wind

like Van Gogh’s starry night

but down below in the sweatshops of the town

I can hear the clacking of children’s bones

like the dancing skeletons

of bamboo windchimes

working the looms of the corporate spiders

that outsourced their innocence to a snake pit.

And I can see in the short-term memory loss

of my own dazed heart and its longing

to be always be happy, wise, inspired and brave,

why most people don’t want to entertain sorrow

any longer than it takes

to outlive a box of kleenex

where you can pull the angels one by one

out of the cellophane birth sac of a womb

or a coffin-shaped kayak

to dry the tears of a snowman

that flow like diamonds from eyes of coal.

I can see what the suicide sees

through the lens of his glass-blown heart

when he’s cutting his feet

on a starwalk of broken chandeliers

through the paleolithic palaces of the next ice age.

Siege skull minds like the black walnuts

of French helmets on the Maginot line

overrun by cannibalistic Neanderthals

that ate their brains

like a larger capacity for starmud

from the inside out as if

they’d inherit the powers

of the men of thought they admired the most.

Memes of liberated protein

with a mutant gene for extinction.

The fibre optics of consciousness

networked to a wireless nervous system

that downloads a terabyte of life a week.

The fossils of happy-faced icons

in the Burgess Shale

like the desecrated sacred syllables,

the pictographic alphabet,

the dead, indecipherable language

of what we didn’t say to each other in time

to make a difference.

PATRICK WHITE