HOWEVER WE EMBRACE IT INTIMATELY TO HUMANIZE IT

HOWEVER WE EMBRACE IT INTIMATELY TO HUMANIZE IT

However we embrace it intimately to humanize it

and make it ours, ingratiate it into our hearts and minds,

to understand it, and through understanding befriend it,

suffering remains impersonal, oblivious to tenderness,

faceless, a dragon without compassion for our appeals.

As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods:

they kill us for their sport. Shakespeare. But suffering

is not what we think about it, not the way we feel,

or the little human why of the fact that it exists at all

we shriek into the unlistening abyss, or keep to ourselves

and cry behind whatever lifemasks we care to put on it

as if it were happening to someone else we didn’t recognize.

These are my eyes and they’re weeping blood.

This is my mouth but the tongue’s been torn out

like the flame of a black candle at a mass for the mute.

And the holy men say suffering purifies. The poet

makes something transformatively creative out of it

as if he had a reptile for a muse that can shapeshift

all around him like a caduceus but doesn’t cure his ills

however he try to dull the pain with an anodyne of symbols.

Two women electrocuted in a pool of water running

to rescue a woman in a car on fire that’s just

brought down a powerline like a cobra from a branch.

The noisy bliss of a school bus smashed at a train crossing

like a beer can in a drunken fist that spares no one,

regardless of age, innocence, karma or the satin in the coffins

to prove that heaven’s a better place than this one

where all we ever see is bloodstains on favourite cotton dresses

little girls with ribbons in their hair are killed in every day.

I’ve opened myself up to the suffering of others

and I’ve seen the waterlilies of compassion

gaping at the stars as if waiting for an explanation

that would make it all beautiful and sane again.

I’ve seen friends go methodically mad trying

to gnaw through the glass lenses of the telescopic eyes

they feel they’re caged in like a spider mount

or a live rat in an aquarium with an exotic trophy snake

blunting the bullet of its head off the walls

until one of the ricochets strikes its exhausted mark.

One man’s agony is the way another makes up for

a personality deficiency by enjoying the kill.

Thirty dead wolves in a pick-up truck culled

by two redneck goofs with egos like guns

to protect the cattle on their way to the abattoir.

And when I drove cab, every morning from six

until noon when even the shadows had to turn away,

I was amazed at how many sick and injured people,

young and old, I drove to the hospital as if there were a war

going on somewhere not far from here,

but the only way you could tell was by

the number of wounded and refugees being carried

back from the front lines to the War Memorial Hospital in Perth.

I was the mobile stretcher bearer for the pilgrims

of the Canterbury Tales seeking salvation from pain

in a secular shrine of excruciating cures.

And I grew angry at a god I don’t believe in

that so many, if not all, were born to suffer

in this way at the whim of a psychopath at play.

And for what? To refine a bit of character

like a nugget of wisdom out of a ton of dark ore?

To attribute a loving cause to a tragic effect?

Clinging to desire in a passing world

might explain a lot and get you by for awhile

in the specious present of mirroring thought-moments

but when you realize you’re just dogpaddling in space

off your leash, and that attachment too is a Buddha activity,

who would dare sit at the bedside of a dead child

and void bound in its absence, quote desire

as the cause of nine cancer treatments

that didn’t send suffering into remission?

War, genocide, disease, poverty, ignorance, perishing,

lock-step ideological synchronicities of power-mongers

murdering whatever they set out to govern

that uphold the very principles their power base

was founded upon by the opinions of their inferiors.

And lovers on either side of the river, their hearts arcing

like bridges Running Bear and Little White Dove

will later jump off of. Pain as transcendent as oxygen.

Mice nibbling through the insulation of the wiring

between the walls like the nervous system of an arsonist

shorting out like a chemical fuse to burn

this hovel of a fire trap in ashes to the ground

and rise from annihilation like a culpable mystic in hell.

Maybe I wasn’t raised to be a good bell, a fire-alarm,

or even an air raid siren hoarse with warning,

and my voice is as useless as a lighthouse on the moon,

and I don’t know enough about any gods

to spiritually gossip behind their backs about

who’s on the nightshift of the terminal wards

and who’s shining like a night light in the morgue

and who’s walking in soft shoes as if

the whole world were a hospital that could attend upon

but not mend a heart that’s ticking like a time bomb

walking through a minefield covered in snow

pushing an electric chair to the edge of futile despair

intent on giving suffering some of its own medicine

like a lethal injection of what we’ve been compelled

to live through with smiles on our deathmasks most of our lives.

I want to see the horror in its eyes, I want it to become

the empath I have, I want it to taste its own tears

pacing a widow walk on its hand and knees

waiting for the sea to give up the drowned.

I want to wound reality for making the pain the rule

and the joy of life a school that doesn’t maintain a teacher

to ask a guru how to dance again without fear

its happiness is going to be shackled to a spider

by a dancing master on the other side of the mirror.

PATRICK WHITE