THE FLOWERS OF THE STREET PEOPLE

THE FLOWERS OF THE STREET PEOPLE

White trash with their faces punched in like catcher’s mitts

mooning the flowers of the street people as they drive by

like a float in a pageant of ignorance having a good time

at everyone else’s expense. Pygmy heroes of their own irrelevance.

Annie, the bag-lady, puts the avalanche of her head down

and spits like salt as if she just survived Sodom and Gomorrah

as she passes by, sullen and resigned to the blackflies

that have swarmed her like the shadows of commas for years.

You just have to take one look at her face to know

she’s the dried rose of a gnostic gospel that went flakey

long before women were forbidden from invigilating

their own spirits. Given the protocols of the bleakness,

even the city can serve as a shrine of sorts. Man bulls

in lunar labyrinths, and the Princess of Spiders,

unweaving her thread in a moment of desire

waiting to have her webs elevated among the stars

in cosmic reprisal for the betrayal of her abandonment to love.

And there’s Peter, the architect turned shipwreck,

on a chain gang in a quarry, he’s cracked so many rocks

to extract the gold rush out of his sixty dollars worth of meteorites

and flush it through his veins like a motherlode

back into the ore of his panspermic flesh. He begs

money on the corner on behalf of his dealer

all day long, a begging bowl that still has to pay

for his drugs in paradise. One day, if he keeps complaining,

because the last thing to go when you’re mad,

is your understanding of money, the dealer’s

going to smile like a snake and pat him on the back

and say, yes, Peter, you’re right, you should be in on the take,

and give him a rock the size of Gibraltar

that will see his mummy being wheeled into

the sarcophagus of an ambulance by the morning

of the next replicated day. Which is maybe what he wants.

And who killed the hysterical rose lady who

for twenty years flogged a little beauty in the bars

to anyone who wanted to make a romantic move

on the flippant female sitting next to them

spending her disability cheque trying to forget

all the shabby dawns that have come on to her like boyfriends

and how she liked to throw them off the bridge to Hull

like the artworks of terrified ex-cons trying to make a getaway.

This actually happened to a friend of mine

in the squalid back room of a degenerate relationship

after he’d been raped repeatedly by a Christian reformatory.

But he can paint in any corner of six possible restaurants

in the Ottawa Market as if he had the eyes of a peacock

in the full bloom of a mating ritual with the waitresses.

And Kathy’s in the doorway again at the bottom of the fire escape

trying to flog the ruined waterlily of her youthful face

as if this were the red light district of Amsterdam

though it’s nothing as lavish as that, to the first john

who wants to use her body like a telephone booth.

I give her money for nothing when I have it and tell her

to spend it on whatever she wants,

so there’s no guilt in the gift to add to her sorrows

and she thinks I’m a funny, wise man,

and though I’m happy I can make her laugh about something

it only enhances my tragic sense of compassion

to feel how brutal the truth can be when I don’t say a word

to dissuade her from believing I’m wise, and she’s still pretty.

And those three skull fractures there

are trying to put a price tag on my Boulet cowboy boots

to denude an old man of his footware in a side alley

after the restaurants have closed down their kitchens,

but there’s still more leather in my heart than mushroom

and they might end up wishing they hadn’t dropped out

of anger management, after they taste the explosive rage

of my munitions factory in a supernova of fireflies

waking the dragons sleeping in an abandoned coal mine

trying to forge their eyes into diamonds, and their claws

into a titanium alloy of crescent moons folded like sabres

they can wield like a blacksmith hammers an anvil

as an objective correlative of all that’s wrong in the world.

Reductio ad absurdum. The philosophical savagery

of a furious muse biting at her wounds like razorwire

in an internment camp for racial profiles, Queen Bee

shows the prostitots and street pups how she uses her needles

to crochet her body like a tea cosy for a Saturnian moon

speedballing heroin and crack with a touch of acetone,

kerosene, and veinous hydrochloride for a purple sunset.

Seminars in vicecraft at the left-handed nightschool

where she teaches starmaps to a class full of armpits

who want to know where to hit up next. Too cool

to be groovy, too chill not to be an ice age,

the temperature plunges like a syringe in permafrost.

Most living through the human mess that’s left

of the mythically inflated lives they used to live

with ineffectual clarity about what’s given them up for dead.

Sleeping with schizophrenic terrorists at the Good Shepherd

who see murder as a form of assisted suicide

and waking up in the morning to a knife-fight

between a mattress and a man who’s been

sleeping with it all night like a woman

he gave everything up for to expiate the horror

of living his eternally recurrent worst nightmare out

like a leper colony of the inchoate body parts of Barbie Dolls.

Had a desperately unloved Barbadian chartered accountant friend once

who had his throat cut in the morning

by two recently released ex-cons in a rooming house

for cooking his fish too loud while they were sleeping.

And that on the heels of landing his first job interview

in the last five futile months, hoping he could

lure his wife and kids back to any standard of living

that didn’t distemper the contagion of his exile.

And the drunks are connoisseurs of shoe-polish

and cheap colognes, shaking like aspens on a street corner

hoping not to foul themselves again in a squad car

before they can regurgitate themselves in the drunk tank.

And all the runaways have run out of faces to flee to

except for the motherly ladybugs who take them

under their spotted wings, and pander them to friends

like cultivated perverts in distinguished places

that know all the G-spots of the ingenuous government

they’ve been molesting on the sly for years.

And it’s fruitless to condemn, judge, blame

or punitively litigate the collateral damage of life

because you’re too delicately squeamish to watch

how the cow is killed, bawling, that you’re about

to sit down and eat with your well-kempt family

and your weedless ethics, o so neat, like a close-cropped lawn.

And if it’s rough and crude. Armageddon isn’t a Sunday school.

And survival’s a boxer that gives and takes dirty shots.

And the only moral imperative life lives by is: Live.

And it’s been a while since I’ve seen anybody

walking in someone else’s moccasins to empathize

why the grace of God went with this one like a greased mirror

that that one had to hitch hike on a turn pike.

And one other thing. I’ve seen shipwrecks

wedged so long on the bottom into their starmud,

the moon among the corals has covered

their skeletons with flesh as if there were terracotta armies

for the most defenceless of us too, and unlike

the pigeons on the statues of the prime ministers

four blocks away, so stoically posed in their noble solitude

attached like figureheads to the foremast of a flag pole,

life thrives vividly all around them like a painter

with a Jamaican sense of colour. And there are luminosities

so brief and brilliant you’d think you were watching

fireflies drop acid with the stars, acts of surrealistic living

where people who have nothing but their mere presence left

cherish giving even that up as well as if compassion

among the desperate, were the last sign of self-respect

that such cornucopias of life can be engendered by shipwrecks.

PATRICK WHITE