LIVING ON A PLANET THAT KILLS MORE
PEOPLE THAN IT HEALS
Living on a planet that kills more
people than it heals.
And the most dangerous of predators,
our own ideals
turning on us like ingrown hairs, solar
flares the wind
blew in our faces without any of the
veils or auroral graces
that used to adorn our amazement at
what our eyes
in creative collaboration with
victimized ions, could do
with the last breath of an expiring sun
god to make it
mystically beautiful and awe-inspiring.
Just
to be a witness to it was enough to
keep your mouth
shut for the next ten thousand years,
the silence
before the sublimity of being in the
presence
as convincing to the farmer as it was
to the astronomer.
As civilization progresses into an
improved savagery
and people grow more bovine in their
living rooms
as the one-eyed liar at the nadir of
the third eye
entrances them into believing they’re
still
grazing in the starfields of
genetically modified astroturf
they were raised on, slowly, from a
moon cow’s point of view
it’s beginning to dawn on people that
civilization
is nothing but the history of war since
Sargon of Agade
first turned the plunder of cattle and
women
into the military imperialism of the
few against the many
by staying like a parasitic cosmic egg
laid
on the pineal gland of a host
caterpillar so civilization,
mimetic word, a cattle prod, an axe,
and an abattoir,
is coming to be seen for the death trap
that it is.
Muddy Waters, there’s anotha mule
kickin in yo stall.
I grew up in an impoverished
neighbourhood
where the garbage cans were full of
people
but I swear, and I’ve seen a lot I
wish I hadn’t,
I’ve never seen so much rot,
corruption, and ignorance,
lacking even elementary street smarts,
as I do
in the portulent politicians and their
fanatically kempt hags
that make you feel so sorry for their
hairdressers,
and the tailors that have to fit them
like a hidden agenda
of hate and greed, oozing through the
seams
of their shapeshifting,
deformed-fitting suits.
Makes you want to stick the old peace
sign of the sixties
down your throat and throw up. Or pack
up
a small tent, like a refugee or an
emigrant
and get in line with the rest of the
waterlilies
who’ve finally given up on trying to
turn
the festering swamp into something
redeemably beautiful
and would rather be homelessly lost
among the stars,
floating down the Milky Way with wild
black swans,
than sit like the eggcup of a crown on
the skull
of a false prophecy missing more than
one link in its evolution.
And if you think not to be appalled by
the stink of the world
is a kind of experienced wisdom, a
seasoned outlook,
then I might suggest that you’ve aged
like offal
complicit in the contagion of worms in
the grass
where the children play on the swings.
And your last best hope
is that your eyes have retained some of
the original innocence
of the fool that you used to be,
before the Medusa turned them to stone
and the colour flaked off like the
irises of violated covenants.
Radical in the sixties, I was into
self-creative destruction,
tallowing sand candles out of napalm
and beeswax
that went off like fifty calibre
lipstick shells in your face.
I occupied. I dropped out. I blew my
own mind
more than once just to make sure the
bridge was burning
by the time I got to the other side of
my own mindstream
and no one was following me like
another blistering ideal
that got thrown like acid in the
maculate face of the full moon.
It was easier to believe in everything
back then
than to make peace with myself even
now,
though I know it’s just one illusion
dead set against another
and I’m sitting naked in the
Himalayas alone at night
trying to hatch a new cosmic egg for
myself
or at least a new cosmology for this
glass third eye
I’ve ground like a lens or the mirror
of a reflecting telescope
with gritty carborundum down to within
an angstrom of perfection
just to be on the same wavelength as
quicksilver and diamonds
when it comes to seeing things that
don’t easily disappear.
Now I can see the stars dancing clearly
from the inside out.
I’m looking for an abandoned
observatory on the top
of the world mountain standing on the
shaky cornerstone
of a snapping turtle, and I’m not
being driven out this time,
exiled among exiles, like some
scapegoat beaten
like an objective correlative for what
is most ugly in humans
that don’t sacrifice themselves for
their own sins.
I’ve been leaving of my own accord
for the last thirty light years
of this wilderness experience for the
wind knows where.
And I still care. And I still help the
waywards of life
that blow across my path like losing
lottery tickets
and one winged butterflies trying to
fly
like the unbound page of a book with
half a wingspan.
I still fight with words and actions
that have been blooded
like Damascene swords in the sacred
forges of my infernality.
I’ve gone on exploring the elusive
dark energy
of my expansiveness long after the
universe went out
and sight stopped being a kind of love
as lucid
as the imagination on a good seeing
night for the sky bound.
But as my compassion has grown deeper,
more holistic
and mystically specific simultaneously
so has the sadness
of feeling so many suffer the
indistinguishable pain
of simply being alive to endure the
agony
of cauterizing their cosmic wounds with
the very stars
they wished upon a heart break ago when
the waterclock
broke like an ice-age dam and the baby
mammoth
was washed away like starmud in a
glacial flood
of Pleistocene tears. And life seems so
randomly perilous
in the way it maims and kills the body
and the mind,
it seems even the wise and the sublime
die as surrealistically
as the sarcastic mentors of trash and
trivia
trying to distract our attention away
from our dilemma
with cheap thrills and punchlines about
the meaning of nothing
so we can’t feel the house burning
down around us
until we’re reminiscing in our urns,
as if we were still haunted by eyes in
the dark
like some lingering significance to our
demise.
Lachrymae rerum. Sometimes I
think the mute rocks
don’t just speak, they weep like
stars
for the things they’ve seen like the
headstones
of prophetic skulls in a cemetery of
ancestral asteroids.
An abandoned observatory, yes, the
jewel in the lotus,
and a large garden where I can grow my
own constellations
like esoteric zodiacs of asters and
sunflowers
and a lover I can bed down with like an
equinox
when our celestial equators intersect
our ecliptics
at the equinoctial colures of our
cosmic G-spots
and we can implode like supernovas in
each other’s presence
just for the pure joy of immolating
ourselves in bliss
to renew the tenderness of the
fireflies who know
there are no limits to how far we can
take this.
PATRICK WHITE
