AMONG SO MANY ATROCITIES OF HUMAN AND INHUMAN NATURE

AMONG SO MANY ATROCITIES OF HUMAN AND INHUMAN NATURE

Among so many atrocities of human and inhuman nature,

what forbidden grace adorns the suicide or the ballet of the drunk

obliterated on razorwire wine at nightfall

as the abandoned bottle exchange for empties and grails

prays for rain to wash the acid from a young girl’s eyes

who wanted to learn to read what everyone else

had forgotten about taking advantage of their fear of death

to remember how beautiful the world once was

when the fireflies emerged like Venus in the dusk

growing brighter as the darkness deepened

into riotous starmaps playing charades

with a bestiary of antique zodiacs in the crowns

of the black walnut trees whose mere presence

was enough to astound anyone. How once you could

open a milkweed pod like the womb of a fortune-cookie

and find a Monarch butterfly inside like infinite riches

in a small room, a wishing well that wasn’t

some kind of tarpit that had just swallowed the moon

like a cosmic glain light years before the dragons

were allowed to carry firearms but the mercy of the rain

that used to fall like cool tears on their scorched wings

like leaves in a drought, without putting the green flames

of their fires out, was strictly forbidden by the greed

and undue influence of the lustreless arrogance

of very mediocre men who ate like a plague of locusts

in a field of genetically modified stargrass

that blighted the wheat in the hand of the Virgin

like seeds of light the wind was forbidden to sow

and poisoned the bread we used to break with each other

like black dwarfs of ergot on the taboo spores

of a bad mushroom trip in the tourist trap

of the mind blowing Eleusinian mysteries on crack.

Apocalyptic opulence runs before the storm

like a herald of the rich and ungovernable

with a message to the poor who can sense

what’s coming like the angel of death to the door

by the way it doesn’t eat what’s put before it

like a crumb of flesh and blood off their own plate

they’re still willing to share, in part, like a crust

from the empty cupboard of their heart

with any stranger who’s come in the night

off the road, asking for directions to Wall Street

like the parable of the man who ran to Aleppo,

like the market share of a corporate nemesis

who insisted upon their personhood like a stem cell

that lied to itself posthumously in anonymous board rooms

where issues of life and death were settled like executive coffins

that closed the book on the matter as if

there were no more to be said to the press

than the obituaries they released like doves they read from

about how much damage had been done

to their reputations by the protests of the vociferous dead.

One false idol pushes another idiotic ideology down

and there’s a domino effect of apostate holy wars

that throw their children like strawdogs

into the bonfire of the inanities to bear witness

to the act of being worthy of their futureless afterlives

like the strangle-hold of tapeworms, the dry rot of termites,

the methane vapour trails of maggots in the dungheaps

and mass graves covered in snow like grey hair

on the skull of the body politic that cuts its nose off

to spite its face if anybody contest its right

to eat the eyes out of the roadkill like blow flies

as if there were no greater vision of life than a body bag

wrapped in a flag, placed in a hole, with the stone of the world

resting on its chest to keep it from rising again

like smoke from the family hearth they buried it under.

On the borders of Rome, just before it fell

the hungry Visigoths were compelled to sell

their children into slavery for a haunch of dogmeat

that used to sit under the emperor’s table at Ravenna

and beg for scraps that fell like the superflux of gluttons

to the bestial floor like pork in a budget proposal

to let the poor eat their own and the rich grow fat

on the cannon fodder at the front lines of the war on poverty

like cattle prods and firing squads in an abattoir,

political bloodbanks feeding on the needs of the people

like lobbyists and leeches, ticks and invasive species

of mosquitoes, flies, drones, killer bees and conservatives

that suck the light out of the life, heart, mind, spirit, will

of humans to go on surviving their own exit

as mechanical confabulations of metallic stem cells

with micro chips for Hox genes, oversee the mass extinction

of life grown suspicious of its own food supply,

the air, the water, the sun, the earth, the sky, each other

like a hive of surveillance cameras keeping their third eyes

on the dying wildflowers by the polluted mindstreams

hydrophobically foaming at the mouth of their own headwaters

like an industrial strain of rabies eating its own rotten heart out

in a chaotic rage of conditioned consciousness nemetically resigned

to its own lies, to the intelligent design of its own demise.

PATRICK WHITE