PARANOIA KILLS LIKE A FANATIC WHAT IT SUSPECTS WITHOUT CONVICTION

PARANOIA KILLS LIKE A FANATIC WHAT IT SUSPECTS WITHOUT CONVICTION

Paranoia kills like a fanatic what it suspects without conviction

isn’t true about what it believes about thinking. It’s getting

mad out here, the moon’s gone rabid and the tides are awry.

Given my age and the quality of my rage tempered

like the sword I fell upon in the waters of life

more evolutionary than the revolution that dropped out

to go back to Daddy’s law school like one of the fashionistas

of idealism who’d rather be wealthy and wonderful than real,

I scry the future behind me in Dr. John Dee’s black mirror,

menace in the air, darkness growing like black mold

in the walls of the house of life, the garotte tightening

around the necks of those who stick out like deathbed confessions

that there are still things worth dying for that make you feel

you’ve wasted your life, given how little has changed.

The bees are estranged from the flowers by neonicotinoids

that go out of their way like pesticides to kill anything

anyone loves anymore, if that’s still credibly possible.

I stare personally into the blank, oblivion of the door

that’s opening up ahead like the threshold of a return address

and I think to myself, every groundhog’s got two holes

to escape by and I can see an eyeless night at the end

of the tunnel of death littered with the corpses of star-nosed moles

that died like molecules for nothing when the light

went looking for their eyes like a convenient disguise

for seeing nothing, hearing nothing, knowing nothing,

the old stars in front of the aimless firing squads of the fireflies,

terrorists in sleeper cells of waterboarded nightmares

with mini-black holes in their hearts you can enter

like a bullet through the brain and leave by an exit-wound

through the mouth of God as the spin doctors infringe

on her copyright, factualizing the fictions, and fictionalizing

the facts like a twenty-four hour news cycle

that teaches you there’s nothing personal in the way

you can’t help but hate your fellow man as if

the only thing that bonded us to one another anymore

on this chromosomatic coil of flypaper were the buzzing

of our anger and disgust at getting stuck without an alibi

for who we are as we plea deal for brain resistant headstones

we can hide under for the duration like cut worms in our roots.

I want to trust. I want to love. I want to seek. I want

to listen to what others speak as if we shared the same silence.

I don’t want to read any more statistics about

the collateral damage of our pandemic neglect.

Twenty-five million children, give a few of them

faces and fingertips in your mind, blood your abstractions

and see your own kids in your mind with the same

quizzical look of disappointed surprise in their

blue, black, green, brown, trusting eyes when they realize

they’ve lived just long enough to be killed by the lies

the elect of the world tell like bedtime stories to landmines

and political screening myths proclaiming they were victimized

by the lack of happy endings for bad seeds who don’t believe

in the same genetically modified creeds of wheat

it’s become a violation of an industrial patent on our cells

to break with each other meiotically once and awhile

as if we really meant bread and medicine when we said

hunger and disease, tired of our guilt spoiling the health

of our featherless chickens born ready for processing

as if the hogs had found a way of shortening the food chain

like a rosary of pearls thrown like loaves and fishes into the trough.

I want to look out over the valley of life as I’m leaving it

like dusk over the shoulder of a mountain I climbed

to get closer to the stars without going blind like people

who look into the face of God and think they recognize themselves.

It may be retrograde on my part to want to celebrate

in an age of desecration, but there’s a beatific demon

of crazy wisdom within me that says do, dance, sing,

whether you have a reason to or not, embrace the absurdity

of dancing with the cloud shadows on the darkening hilltops

against the gathering storm of a clockwork apocalypse

on the nightshift of a graveyard where the stars go to die

because they can’t live on the mean skies that make them feel

like mere satellites of the visionary fingerpaintings

we smear on our narrowing eyes like the aperture of a Cyclops.

Even if you have to sing like a soft metal alloy in a language

twisted by the mutated sensibilities of the times as

the cherry bloom cankers its perfection at Chernobyl and Fukushima

as the first sign of the fallout of a drastic spring.

Sing about anything as if there were a muse of chaos

lodged in your heart like a cardinal in an evergreen

that took over your house like a riot of homeless guests.

Dirge, dorn, whimper like a deermouse that believes

it’s got Lime disease, put your hands over your ears

like a hood over the head of a red-tailed hawk

and shriek at the sky like fingernails clawing a blackboard

if you must, but find a way to go insane

that lets you sing in the asylum to yourself

sitting by the window in the artificial light of a false dawn

with an irrefutable smile on your face you don’t need to wipe off

like a mirror that’s getting ready to take your place in the universe.

Right here and even now where it’s imminently conceivable

things will get worse and worse and worse and worse

and the dead will legislate for the living myths of origin

only the stillborn of the imagination will subscribe to,

and the dispossessed alienated by a deathmask

that slowly effaces them like a farcical masquerade

of the lives they pretend to be living for the sake of appearances

will cultivate exotic norms of madness that will conform

to the unconscionable scions of chaos living like

the mountainous echo of a moral code that couldn’t restrain them

deep within where apocalypse originates not as fire or ice

but the afterbirth of a forbidden silence that never shows its face.

Even in the midst of this, Loki, a sacred clown,

a downcast harlequin with long fingers sitting disconsolately

on a beach ball as the circus packs up to move on,

a trickster crow, a dark farce of your dynastic selves

in a long hall of mirrors warped by the gravitational lies

you have to vow to the dark every night to ground the shapeshifter

you’ve become in your absence in the starmud

of your next astronomical catastrophe to keep

from taking your extinction personally, whatever,

whomever, whyever you have to do, make it the labour

of a capricious preference, if nothing else, to sing like a universe

to the genius of your solitude as if you were setting

a loveletter to your muse on fire to show her how

serious you are about passionately annihilating your inspiration

in the thousands of eyes she has shed like tears over the lightyears

to silver the mirrors that flow like the radiant rivers of the waters of life

from your improbable heart over the precipitous thresholds

of a homeless art that’s been on this mysterious road long enough

not to close the gate after it like an exit with nothing to look forward to.

PATRICK WHITE