YOU DON'T HAVE TO TELL ME YOU DON'T CARE

YOU DON’T NEED TO TELL ME YOU DON’T CARE

You don’t need to tell me you don’t care, not caring

is an environmental condition since humans became

too dangerous to trust their own minds as the world,

let themselves be morning doves in the phoenix-fire of the sumac,

or a light within a light like a planet in the dusk,

the pink lilac of Mercury, the flashing white

gardenia of Venus. Killing only lets you be

one thing else

after you’ve deleted all the rest. Not caring

is the shape of a final heart, the rose recast by the minerals

as stone, cell by cell, nest by nest, petrified

by the cuckoo whose young shoulder the eggs of its host out

like refugees that take over the government

that gives them shelter. Not caring

is an ancient battlefield in the morning

where crows and old women, idiots, wretches, dogs

plunder the dead lying like islands in the mist,

a cemetery of maggots that froze before

they could finish eating the horse. Not caring

is deciding to live without punctuation

because everywhere you went something got in your way

like crosswalks or streetlights, your desire for precious metals,

to drink the silver pure, frustrated everywhere

by the corroded goblets and encrustations

of people who smiled like ores and tons of granite. Not caring,

is a leftover of porous slag and a gaping quarry,

and the gifts of not caring are always accidental

and come wrapped in the skins of old enemies, a relic of fangs

that fell out like the phases of the moon

when the new ones with their upgraded toxins appeared.

You don’t have to tell me you don’t care,

I’ve lived under glaciers long enough to know

the knives of the small arctics that plunge through the heart

like kingfishers never cry; I know

the striations of stone eyes

that leave their runic watermarks

like scars and coats of arms on a shield, how

the polar caps can descend down over a skull

for thousands of years and the people revert to hides.

Not caring is a moth-eaten charter

of inalienable human blights;

chained like a telephone book to the left side

of a junkie Medusa that sold Pegasus to a riding academy

for the last hit to take off her head

long before Perseus showed up like a rehab centre.

Not caring is a way of saying

the world has let you down like an elopement

you once waited for all night at a window

when windows were made of water,

and it was an eclipse of everything you loved,

not the moon with its ladder

that came for you, the world, a foot in the door

of the opening lotus. The scarlet runner

of the iron in your blood

turned to rebar in cement to reinforce

the dead meteor of the foundation stone

that crashed through your celestial ceiling

as if God had personally thrown a rock at you

and killed your peacock in an avalanche of eyes.

Here’s a bit of not caring, here’s

the splinter of a black dwarf

that will add a little gravity to your requiem: boo hoo.

But who could mean it; who so foolish,

watching your blood-drenched weathervane

beating wingless in the air, the harbinger

of a past catastrophe, to foul the summer wind

that runs schools of stars like fish into the nets

of the auroral curtains gusting across the night sky

with a blizzard of vindictive spiders?

Everywhere the abdomens and sulphurous bouquets

of burnt match-heads. A still-life with webs.

The mummifed embryo of an aborted afterlife

and an umbilical cord undone

like a shoelace in a coffin. Not caring

is a black hole with an event horizon

that is a one-way threshold, the edge of the flat earth,

the useless wing of a collapsed dimension,

a climacteric of cannibals.

You don’t have to tell me you don’t care;

turn the rock of the world over in most,

shine a light in the corners between

the rafters in the damp basement, and you’ll see

a Nazi who wears black, kid leather gloves and breezy colognes

when he mutilates, Aryan bird wheels of destruction

frozen like galaxies and desecrated flowers in metal

arranged logically on the iconic desktop

of his universally translatable uniform, and this

is a man who doesn’t care, and this is a long, black, centipede;

and you’ll see his aspiring counterpart, a soldier

closer to home, a Chilean carabinero,

a mighty man with a can of gasoline and a condom

and a brutalized woman from the university

he rapes and burns at the side of the road back to his family,

the irisless eyes of two periods for proof he has fangs

and knows how to use his glands and organ

like a sun-tanned mamba in shades; and this

is a man who doesn’t care, and this, his machismo aside,

is a red army ant washing the general’s dirty underwear

like nettles in formic acid as he boils to be someone.

And over there, with headphones on, saline drips pumping

psychotic punk hormones through his neuronic circuitry

like flame-throwers in an air-conditioned ideology

that’s convinced it’s a tank in the deserts of Iraq,

is the boy next door who’s just made burgers and fries

of a five thousand year old Arab village

immolated like the villain of a video-game, all in the name

of a democratic republic that injects its mutable eggs

into the body of the living host

they will liberate, imperialize, and devour, and this

is a man who doesn’t care, a large, black wasp

trying to win the tiger stripes of a killer bee.

And there where the rat died dehydrated by an industrial poison,

if you look closely, beneath the sleek, moist pelt,

that puts a new spin on infestation, you’ll see

a tiny thing that calls itself a multinational corporation,

no bigger than a comma with a decimal head,

a reflex of life with the pituitary glands of a giant

who claims to own the rain in Bolivia, the arm pits

of western Africa, the people of Belize,

the grain belt of southern Saskatchewan and Alberta,

food, medicine, animals, diseases, fossils, oil, minerals, ore, genes

and the child labour of millions anywhere

there’s a dumpster with a constitution

that can’t borrow enough from the swine at the trough to eat; and this

is a legally verifiable person who doesn’t care, not a man,

but a maggot that lives in the nose

of the living and the dead like a merger in the boardroom

of a wounded world where everything is either

custard or pus. You don’t have to tell me you don’t care.

You didn’t care in Armenia, Dachau, Palestine, Sabra

and Shatila, Cambodia, Chile, Tienanmin Square, Kent State, Watts,

Wounded Knee, Algeria, Vietnam, South Africa, Manchuria, Tibet,

Siberia, El Salvador, Belfast, Uganda, Argentina, Sudan and the Balkans,

and you don’t care now that there are children

with hep-C and aids who sell their bodies

like golden chariots in the sewer to support a habit

they learned on lullaby knees like a crutch or a church.

You don’t have to tell me you don’t care;

I can see the homeless everywhere treated like the broken glass

of an emergency someone eventually pulled

as a messed-up prank on the moon;

and the afflicted, the lonely, the addicted, the dispossessed and the aggrieved

hoping to leak out of what was crushed like wine

as the last paint rag of hope to staunch the wound

unspools like a rainbow on an oilslick

and agrees against the colour of their own eyes

that the best of dreams is just

a momentary refraction of black;

but you don’t have to tell me you don’t care,

I can hear the shriek of your non-existence

unplugging the tree from the fruit, the sun from the sky,

the star from the vine, the river from the sea everywhere

until all that’s left to excavate is a grave in the air

for the blown lightbulb that can’t weld back

the merest filament of its own severed lifelines.

PATRICK WHITE