STUPID, STUPID WORLD FULL OF LIES

STUPID, STUPID WORLD FULL OF LIES

Stupid, stupid world full of lies, self-deceit, greed,

conspiratorial stinging nettles, leeching bills, vampiric,

cutting off the flow of things like tiger-mussels,

hillbilly hippies beating up their girlfriends on crack,

all these egotistic puff ball mushrooms with labial gills

mythically inflated by one night’s good rain

into albino planets, people who have more keys to heaven

than they have locks on hell, abandoned school bells

that go on talking to themselves like wandering scholars

light years after the children grew old at their perennial recess

and the moths and the mice and the mildew

keep putting out books epilogues after everyone’s

forgotten how to read the signs of their own decay.

Between the horns of the moon that’s been thrown

like a goat skull into the wishing well of my heart,

roadie spiders string my harp for me like false eyelashes

in the green room, and the nerves of the mirrors

are shattered into the frayed deltas of the ropes of hope

endangered elephants are trying to climb up to heaven on.

The thin-skinned blissed-out gardenias of Maharajji

are wilting under the eyeshadow of their Mary K cosmetics

as their rainbows grow vicious as vegan dogs

in a spiritual junkyard of razorwire and foodchains

that have overextended their supply lines like the umbilical cords

of kites and puppets and angels on the strings of arachnids.

Too pure for me. I’d be afraid of getting myself on their floors.

Tracking starmud in from the mindstream I’ve been floating down

from one neuron to the next, one town to another,

like the new moon of an origami swan in a scenic calendar

of apocalyptic moments in the life of a hand grenade

people keep pulling on like the handle of an empty fridge.

Count me among the Andalusian vandals of the delinquent dragons

who keep writing obscene truths in lampblack and terza rima

on the walls where the flamethrowers post their prophecies.

I was born to burnish gold. I was born to dry the eyes

of weeping diamonds. I was born to wire the rainbow bridges

with satchel charges of fireflies and lightning for demolition

so everybody can learn to swim through stone

like glaciers to the other side of their polarized cataracts.

And whenever I look at a house of worship built on quicksand

I’ve got to laugh like an avalanche of meteors

at the self-serving lustrations of their pretentious extinctions

as the world blazes all around them like a halo of inflammable hairspray.

I’ve got holy wars of my own to go to that won’t be disarmed

by the soft swords of their beeswax candles surrendering

to such a little flame of life at the tip of a limp wick

that trembles with every breath it takes like a feather in a furnace.

I see the mad dogs like arsonists with hydrophobia

frothing at the mouth for war, citing ancient conflagrations

from the burnt out scriptures of their sacred matchbooks

raving at the supernovas that ignore them like ingrown solar flares

that couldn’t stand up to a drought, let alone a forest fire.

What good is inspiration if it hasn’t got a detonator?

Or enlightenment if all it does is ignite a funeral pyre,

cremate a desire to live like a peer of the dynastic galaxies

you were born among with the silver spoon of a universe in your mouth

whether you use it to cook crack, take your medicine

like a human suffers an excruciating transformation,

or let the hummingbirds sip from it like syringes

flagging snakestongues of blood in celestial sugar water?

And all the warrior poets buffed like medicine bags

of talcum powder, and all the healers selling

batches of bad heroin like dealers to the high school kids

who used to steal their mother’s oxycontin from the medicine chest

so they could rail the yellow brick road like roadkill.

All the vates, seers and shamans consulting

prophetic pundits and polls as the critics

repeal the fate of the artist before she’s born,

cuckoos taking over the nests of better birds,

parasitic guests taking over the house of the host

as the journalists turn from objective observers

to political spiders weaving the webs they spin as the news

and the audience, breaking mutually consenting protocol

gets up on stage with Hamlet and turns a play into a talkshow

for the fifteen minutes of pop-tart celebrity left on their i-phones.

Originality that used to emanate from the roots up

like the light coming out of a dark universe

now seated like an air traffic controller in an orchard

like the wind assigning runways and instructions

on where to take off and land to a riot of blossoms

with pre-conceived flightpaths and well-known destinations.

Creative writing professors in the literary mills

grinding the grist for whole new generations

of mimetically enculturated oxen

to keep the wheels turning of a lucrative careers bank

that used to be the calling of the insanely inspired

too busy working in the visionary mines of their genius

looking for jewels of insight to waste their potential

on getting a job regurgitating words for baby pelicans,

masticating poetry into spiritual pulp fiction

or sipping them from other men’s mouths as if

spit were the nectar of the muse they’ve never met.

The real dragons, their spines lined with sundials,

really don’t care how many chapbooks you’ve published in a year

nor how many times per capita you’ve mentioned butterflies

just to ensure your fan club you’re still sensitive to beauty

or where you’re reading next like a matchbook

burning in the valley of Tuwa or whether your chimney-spark

expiring under the stars is an inferno of unignited creosote

caked in your throat like a callous of black matter

or the ore of the braille alphabet blocks you throw

like snake eyes in dice playing your randomness off

against the lottery of your autobiography copied and pasted

like a colony of red army ants putting your books together

like a folio of butterfly wings perfectly bound for the ant heap.

PATRICK WHITE