FIREFLIES LIKE TERRORIST ACTS AGAINST THE STARS

FIREFLIES LIKE TERRORIST ACTS AGAINST THE STARS

Fireflies like terrorist acts against the stars.

Truth on the oyster of the tongue spun

like a grain of sand, an irritant fact

into the nacreous lustre of lies. Those are pearls

that were his eyes, the politicians sink so low

they’re flatworms in platform shoes.

Not a good idea to wipe your ass

with your own ideals in public. It

shocks the mob to realize their magi are maggots.

When the mob loses face, heads roll.

The latent rage of a thousand real and imagined ills

swarm out of the pinatas of your May Day festivals

like the nemetic scourge of God whipping the eyes

of the media into a frenzy of visionary vengeance.

Paranoia becomes a civic duty and Big Brother

no more than someone you know in the Mafia

doesn’t give a damn whether you’re related to him or not.

Maternal piety suckles at the poppy’s breast

and we bleed like the dreams of sleepwalkers

on the prophylactic precipice of the razor’s edge.

Down below in the middens of the rejected

the skulls of children heaped like shepherd moons

that didn’t make the cut of random luck

and ideological purity run amok with inhumanity

like secret police with unlimited budgets

to protect the state by interrogating the genomes

of their citizenry for any mutant signs of evolution.

The most bitter and appalled among us profess optimism

like roses in the sunset of a mushroom cloud

as lethal as the Angel of Death when it rains

and amateur survivalists are complaining of stomach pains.

Science is taught to shut its mouth by a thug

that knows what’s good for it is also good

for the Golden Goose that lays the cosmic eggs

in the Eleusinian Mysteries of dialectical materialism.

Covert telescopes replace the glass eyes

of enlightened Cyclops with black ops that move

like Ninjas in the night, the hashashim of the Old Man

of the Mountain, the shining city on a hill,

to eliminate any doubt of the positive outcome

of imperial altruism bearing the white man’s burden

like Coca Cola, ho, ho, ho, come like Santa Claus to Belize,

or Shell to the arctic like the ark of an oil platform

leaking like the shepherds of the black camel

in the white deserts in the land of the midnight sun.

Five billion years of astronomical catastrophes creatively

eliminating species that weren’t related directly to us

and the acclamation of human consciousness as the only

mode of intelligence to make it in the long run

like the Boston marathon through a gauntlet

of pressure cookers that can’t stand up on their own two legs

without cooking nails in the practical crackhouses of hardware stores

prosthetically intent on martyring human femurs

on a pyre of crutches you can’t throw away like a miracle cure

at the top of the cathedral stairs you climbed on your bleeding knees

to walk on air like a prayer to the angels of mercy

listening like drones and satellites high overhead

to the screams of the uncircumspect innocent at the finish line.

Desecration, as if we were angry with our gods

like the Mayans who burnt their temples one day

in desperation for a famine the seven fat kine

the untempered greed of the bankers caused

at the end of civilization that knows more about us

than we do it, with honey for some and locusts for others

in a foreclosed wilderness with radio-controlled wolves,

and nano-sized mosquitoes like puncture wounds

at the beginning of the data chain that leads

like breadcrumbs on the road of knowledge suspiciously

like the photo-shopped streets of London back to us

like a hallucinogenic reality show in highspeed HD.

Decry something sacred, something unanalytically

vulnerable like a misplaced faith in the immunity

of our genetically modified mothers to protect us

from diseases like an insurance policy that didn’t cover us

or the honey bees o.d.ing on the pestilential nicotinoids

that cling like smallpox to the blankets we gave the natives

to keep warm like a guest with a fever in the charnel house of life.

What sweetness mined like pollen from a corpse flower

is ever going to taste like viscous sunshine to a corporate hive

whose growing pains are always parasitical genocide

of one kind or another? Caterpillars against butterflies.

Pervs, perps, terrorists, ghouls and demented one percenters

of the unbikerly kind, the mob won’t die benignly like road kill.

Once the genuflective holiness of the gilded shepherd’s crook

is seen by the sheep who bleated for rescue to be what it is,

a cattle prod in an abattoir of grain-fed coup d’etats,

you’ll be eating the meat of your children boiled

in their mother’s milk, when the mob’s preference

for fair-mindedness is murderously offended like a snakepit

that was minding its own business like Babylon at a ball game

when your bomb went off like a prelude of the apocalypse

you so furtively desire like a plague rat of self-hatred

seeking notoriety in the shadows of things to come

that go boom, boom, boom, like something infernally gargantuan

protecting her young like the infuriated mother of mayhem.

PATRICK WHITE