JOURNEY

I'm on some kind of journey

but I don’t know where it’s going;

I’m growing wings and shedding them,

and I’m true to every thought in my head.

I’ve got a heart, worn down at heels,

a used voodoo doll quilled like a native,

a meteorically battered planet

that wobbles between a kiss and a fist

in the way it keeps running itself around.

I spend too much time alone.

There are no obstructions in any direction;

and barefoot, I’m walking on stars and poppies,

talking to myself like a candle,

weaving my way among the shadows

like a fish through the supple harps

of the silver river reeds. I see

that I’m taking a bath in my own grave

to wash the soiled skies of the painted world

off my eyes, to behold

the brief career of the leaf of life

and how the light gusts out from the windows

like curtains and bird-nets. Life is short,

and the new temple never gets further built

than a hole and a single cornerstone, the rest

left to the business of the earth,

all that beauty and magnificence,

unravelled among the mud weavers.

I was inoculated against death

by a splinter of the moon;

by how little time there is for love,

for the root to get drunk

on the fruits of enlightenment and compassion,

by how little I will ever know

of the road to the doorway I stepped through

to stand in awe before the moon spill

on the raven blue waters,

and to look so deeply into the eyes of a woman

who has just conceded an island in her passage,

and the fragrance of unheard music

that I am a pillar of wonder

before the unsayable

as she lets drop her shadows and feathers of light,

and the blood-god assumes

his flowering crown of fire

to enhance the splendours of his courtly intensities.

What I have lost in the river

I will find in the river

and what I have taken from the sky

I will give back to the sky,

and there shall come a day

when the eclipse will be the brighter mirror,

and the darkness that overtakes me now

will be a gate of stars to a water palace

where the dragonflies and waterlilies

are the scepters and crowns of a human divinity

that will endure like a whisper of radiance,

a more haunting taste of light,

the rumour of a black rose

that outshines the angels

that coax the lanterns out of the night.

I will evaporate like the flaring of fireflies

on the windy shore of a trembling lake,

like the blue hat plume of smoke

from a gallant winter chimney

into the vastness of my own mind

like a waterbird without a trace into a sweeter, wilder solitude.

And these words will come and go

like the tides of the ocean I was,

like the providential leaves

of unfurling fortune-cookies,

like an avalanche of gold

washed down from the mountain upstream.

I write them in flowing diamond,

I write them in auroras of blood,

in dawns bluer than the iris of a peacock’s eye,

in fire and water and the mystic inks of the night

in the fleeting, indelible dream

of doors and hands and moons,

in warm breath on a cold window,

in a halo of comets

smeared into light by the sun,

in the sidereal wines that bled from bitter wounds,

I have said what it was mine to say

on a page of the wind

that whistled through me like life

greening the sands of the hourglass

with visions that ripened the bell of blood in my heart

to fall like wisdom from its tower

toward a fallible paradise

that won’t leave me as I am for long.

And I will jump again

into this cauldron of joys and sorrows

to string my spinal cord

over the abyss of the guitar-shaped universe,

walking upright

to plead with my own answers

to thaw like a mirror

estranged from the world it reflects

in the self-effacing flames

of the passionate gardens that dance on the wicks.

The awakening seed

echoes these flowers of fire

in the valley of a voice in the furnace

that lies down in the cool grass

by a stream of idle stars

and arrays its vagrant heart

like a breeze of blood in the dust

to the refugees in the shadows.

They move like eyelids
through all the phases of the moon
from an unspooled well of darkness

to the slash of a razor of light

to the threshing of the full harvest

in the siloes of the nightwind

enthroned like a breath of life

in the midst of its own dispersal.

PATRICK WHITE

EVERYTHING ON THE GARBAGE DUMP

EVERYTHING ON THE GARBAGE DUMP

Everything on the garbage dump

like the picked over pyre of an unholy death.

The rubes seeing through the ruses of the rich

straight into their computerized living rooms

behind the razor wire and grapevines.

Bad mistake. The poor begin to compare,

and where they wanted to be elite yesterday,

today they smoulder like a root fire

at what’s been done to them

many days before by what goes on under

the cornerstones of our quicksand institutions

imploding under the mass of corruption at their core.

Lies so immense, even the media can’t eat them,

and scum-bag politicians wallowing in what

they don’t want anyone else to have. A cure

for a child that’s dying, after having lost her hair,

a bed for a homeless man who’s off his meds,

a job for his son and daughter, open-handed economics

where the destitute aren’t eating the scraps

that fall off the elemental table of the obscenely overfed.

And this is to put it as mildly as I can

so as not to bully anyone with the truth,

but I grew up at the bottom of a garbage can

and I know who’s sitting on the lid of a buried i.e.d.

that’s about to go off like a volcanic toilet-bowl.

The black dove cries to the burning heavens

and earth’s about to show us why you don’t

steal from your own crib, or piss in your own womb.

The flesh-eating disease has gone too far.

There’s smog in our children’s hearts and eyes.

The wealthy come into a focus on a gun sight.

Revulsion deepens. Everyday you can hear

the backbones of people’s wills breaking

like the great boughs and small twigs

of an old growth forest in an ice-storm.

People close up like stores and the candling parachutes

of the daylilies who stay in bed all day,

grateful for twenty more minutes of hallucinating

an oasis in a desert they know they’re going to die in.

Bad meat down the well. Corporations

with more of an identity than your daughter has,

but ask any drone who she is

and there’s a databank somewhere

that would be happy to tell you for a considerable fee.

She’s nobody that concerns us yet. But the time,

and I mean it more today than I did yesterday,

is coming, that nemetic moment when the guillotines

are brought out like garden shears pruning roses

of their buds, and Wall Street ticks swollen with blood

of their heads. One after another. The regenerative hydra

clear cut like the trees and the tribes of the Amazon jungle.

No more listening to the Lord of Flies brainwashing us

into believing its maggots are butterflies. No more

second, third, fourth, fifth innocence, reborn or otherwise,

for the retroactive alibi that tells us how sorry

and concerned he is that others don’t follow

the same psychopath that he’s making money off,

even if it’s been going on since Uruk and Ur.

Even religion being rendered unto like Caesar.

The shepherds of the black camel build tall buildings in the desert.

No birds sing in the eucalyptus trees of Israel

that spring up like political spin over bulldozed Arab homes.

And the last man born on earth will grovel in the dust

at his sister’s feet. Signs of the end times articulated

by an annihilated Sufi in a zawiya of the thirteenth century.

Who born among us today, doesn’t know exactly

what he was talking about? As we run out of water,

breathable air, edible food, futile hope and dangerous inspiration.

Mineralized humanity fossilized in the Burgess Shale

of a virtual reality exploding into millions of alternatives

to evolution in the Pre-Cambrian Age of mutative technology.

And people will gather according to rule and ask for change.

But their shepherds will only shorten the chains

and tighten their grip on their hearts like a man

in a strip club keeps a grip on his wallet,

but the intensity unvented will supersaturate the air

and mount the event horizon like the anvils of thunderheads

and much will be struck down in an atavistic replay

of the polymorphous perverse trying to figure out

what shape it should assume so the cure remains

more plausible than the disease that the ideological scalpels

just cut out with no distinction made

between a human heart and a tumour.

Beauty and intelligence will become suspect

to the mediocre and ugly, and the ethics of the day

will be the stage directions of a bad morality play

as the captains of commerce and the nabobs of worse

thresh the salted earth like necrophagoi

watched over by the scarecrow of a c.e.o.

I can hear the karmic atrocities of the sorrows

that have muscled the birds out of the trees

with hortatory elegies for the windfall of sour bells

that were cut down like the fruit of a noose.

Injustice will redress injustice with mob sentiment

adamant about the rabid obscenity of human lovelessness

that has been perpetrated like a myth of origin in their name.

Things will still burn, but not in a flame as they used to,

but in a scalding acid bath of eyes learning to read

the graffiti on the wall as if it were written

on their own gravestones. Sybarites with desecrant sensibilities

will destroy without creation anything that reminds them

of who they are not. Art will become

the artificial antiseptic to the toxin of life

and there will be more joy in cynicism than there is

the natural love of a man for his wife and children.

But the litany of metaphorical omens is perilously long

and eventually even Lao Tzu rode out of town on an ox

into the available dimensions of a future in the hills

to die alone among the doomed wildflowers undistracted

by the human race. And Jesus had his wilderness.

Buddha, Venus and his Bodhi Tree, Moses, his desert,

in lieu of the Promised Land, and Muhammad, his cave.

Everyone of these enlightened masters had to get away for awhile

to receive what was given to them to believe.

That all the threads of the strong rope

would come undone in time like spinal cords

and all a decent human could do, when life

oversteps its own bounds into unconditioned chaos

is drive a small herd of goats up to the mountain top

to get out of the way of the avalanche of prophetic skulls

coming down in a rush to avoid their own warnings.

So, yes, if you really care, if you’ve cared all along,

don’t crowd into the shrine of your third eye

to escape the approaching storm, expecting shelter

from that sense of goodness that hovers over you

like an angel using drones. As Muhammad said

the red-haired, one-eyed liar will amaze you

and many now lustrous, but empty, will succumb to its power.

And trivialities will cat walk in the robes of the sublime.

And only branded cattle in the abattoirs of a violent education

will learn the true power of a name. The arks of yesterday

will save themselves like luxury lifeboats

that jumped the ship of state, on its way down,

when it turned into a hospital barge on the rocks,

full of the body parts of abandoned children

who didn’t live long enough to learn how to sink or swim

before they were shucked like baby turtles by seagulls

and the undertakers came, like parasites, to finish off the rest.

Take a break. I know how bilious a heart can feel

eating a spoon of ashes a day from the urn of the world

as if you had nothing left but your spiritual ancestry to live on.

Change your diet. Eat the buds of day lilies, eat

the purple pagodas of the stag horn sumac before

it immolates itself in the fall. Grow yourself a new tail

to replace the one they tried to catch you by, skip your koans

out over a large midnight lake like water birds taking to flight.

Buff the horrors with wild raspberries and the overnight sensations

of mushrooms as big as a skull or the moon emerging from death.

Rejuvenate. Restore. Let the shoemaker tack new soles to your cells,

and reattach the flight feathers to your calloused heels.

Let the wind blow the stars through your hair like the willows.

And the moon hang awhile like dew on the mandalas

of your musical spiderwebs. Learn how to carry a tune again

like water in the bucket of your larynx

or the fire in your gut that once could weep like diamonds

that cut through your tears without doing any damage.

Breathe in and forget that long or short every breath

is infinitely intimate with everything that’s ever lived.

Detached. Disconnected. Cut off. Unplugged.

Renew your erotic affiliation with your body

and see, though bruised, how the starmud still shines

even after you’ve taken a bath in your own grave

and the water runs off your skin like moonlight.

Do this for yourself without throwing salt

in the roseate wounds of your conscience.

Do this in a solitude that doesn’t try to cram the mystery

into the small locket of the human heart

that carries your counter-intuitive likeness

of the way things ought to be in the better world behind us.

Do this to remind yourself of the bliss of what it is

to be a human alone with stars, so you don’t forget

the experience you’re trying to convey to the unmindful and lost

must be renewed from generation to generation

like a dragon breathing into a tinder box of flammable emotions.

And then even if it’s just for the dignity of a lost cause,

or merely the preference of this absurdity to that,

or enlightened self-interest with too much intelligence

to have completely transcended itself inconceivably,

return to the maelstrom like the cult of a contemplative

that’s at least an initiate in the mysticism of action

who doesn’t mistake a sword that kills you back into life

for the wishbone of a harp that pleads with hell for the dead

who will always double-back on you

like the retrograde motion of Mars as you overtake it,

an orbit with an inside track on the sun that naves the wheel.

A habitable planet with a genius for life and love that’s real.

PATRICK WHITE