MY HEART SCALDED BY THE ACIDS OF THE WORLD

MY HEART SCALDED BY THE ACIDS OF THE WORLD

My heart scalded by the acids of the world,

thorns in my eyes like atrocities of light,

my tears the Rorschach blood spatter

of kids colouring in the chalk outlines

of their corpses on the sidewalks of Chicago.

Outrage grown so high-pitched it’s shrieking in silence

but there isn’t a mirror you can hold up

to human nature that isn’t cracked

like the sound barrier of a voice-box

that can’t believe the shit it’s hearing

out of the mouths of monostomes. Monostomes

eliminate through the same mouths they eat with

like the austerity budgets of the unseemly rich

ingratiated like tapeworms in the body politic.

Ignorant, avariciously vicious bankers, lobbyists,

Taliban North hating in the name of Jesus

anyone who wasn’t baptized white and leprous

in the same creation myth of the gene pool

they’re immersed in like the charred fossils of doves

in the La Brea tarpits of an approaching eclipse,

politicians hard-wired like wooden dummies

to the ventriloquist puppet-masters pulling their strings

like umbilical cords that give women just enough rope

to go moor themselves to their bodies

like aborted lifeboats in an ice storm

of mysogynist legislation that says like Leviathan

to the sea you must bring forth like a public fountain

or hang from your own lifeline like a coathanger

in a meat locker. While the church diddles

little boys in the choir, go tell, Theotokos,

the mother of God, the sea, when the spirit of light

whispers into her ear you shall bear a child,

she must give immaculate birth to the offspring

of rape and incest, open Pandora’s box

or suffer like an honour killing in the name

of a vaginal probe with the spiritual life

of the used condom that miscarried you

like a outhouse into this legislative grotesquerie of life.

What’s it like to be born so obnoxiously powerful you can

desecrate an entire atmosphere with

the very first breath you take on earth?

To spy on worlds within worlds like a Peeping Tom

to compensate for the stunted sex life

of the keyhole you were in highschool

and still get caught violating your own

perverted taboos like an ingenue with a hooker

you copulate with like a medicine bag of snake oil

with an empty wallet that will later flush you out

in a douche of sexually righteous disgust.

Bullets for hummingbirds on the streets of democracy

window dressing the hearse of your lilac principals

with paid mourners of the dead corrupting the laws

you bequeath as a legacy to the living

like the quotas of private prisons you’re in bed with.

Everybody knows you’re giving a bad name to the sluts

that indulge your morbid appetite for body counts.

You really think we’re going to erect a phallic obelisk

to Amun in the temple of Karnak like a black farce

in your honour? I saw you in the senate of Rome

like an oil executive in the food supply. Ever wonder

why Caligula, mad as he was, made the good horse sense

of Incitatus a full consul over you? Leading plague rats

led by the noserings of party politics by elephants and jackasses.

The people know the difference between eagles and turkey-vultures.

The people can tell the difference between a knot

and a tree ring in the depths of their heartwood,

who’s a moonrise and who’s the goatshead

polluting their housewells like a fracking ceo

who wants to privatize the waters of life in their housewells.

The retributive karma of swarming killer bees

will taint the weedless sunshine of your decrescent,

unfertile smile like a Sahara of the same pesticides

that mutated the honey in the hives of the golden rule.

You will walk naked through the flames of hell

like hogsweed throwing acid in your eyes,

like fanatical spitting cobras on the same

radioactive wavelength of illiterate soul you are.

Your cartouche will be effaced like the writing

on the wall you never learned to read like an Afghan schoolgirl

for fear the word of God might liberate her

from the likes of you. The hadith of Muslim and Bukhari

say Muhammad liked prayer, perfume and women the best.

What do you think he’d think of you whether

you were a Christian or a Jew, Shia or Sunni,

reeking like a corpse flower of religion

over the cadavers of everything he cherished?

When the shepherds of the black camel

raise tall buildings in the desert, when no bird

sings in the eucalyptus candelabras of the promised land,

and a Chinese man, the last on earth, grovels

in the dust at his sister’s feet, aren’t those the signs

the Sufi said ushers in the end of the world?

Meet you at Megiddo on the plains of Jezreel.

Array your banners like the political bunting

of the shills for a military-industrial complex

that size our children up for personal landmines

or the god’s-eye of a drone collating potential roadkill

like a sewer of blood along a highway of tears.

Here’s my prophecy. When the food on my plate

is a lie. When the air I breathe is toxic filth.

When the water I drink explodes in my face.

When the earth groans under the deadweight

of paradise in the charnel houses of the killing fields

and the nuclear waste of the afterbirth

of the first fusion bomb is leaking into the watersheds

of Washington State like history being made

retroactively like the half life of plutonium.

When the sea is vulgarized like a garbage dump

as the moon is soon to be and childhood already is.

When the police approach their own species

more and more dressed up like insects

in the toolkits and garb of war and nine civilians

die for every soldier in the field since World War II

and there are no medals handed out for the casualties

killed in the doorways of third world powers

by those who have come to save their hearts and homes

like well-armed cowards who mythically inflate

the courage it takes to initiate a scorched earth policy

in an air-conditioned computer room of apocalyptic vidiots.

All militaries are climax-controlled millenarians

with their finger on the trigger of the Big Bang

like the G-spot on a starmap of sidereal explosions.

When hopelessness is more accurate than faith in life.

When four hundred billion dollars is spent

on an F-35 to feed the political career banks

of insatiable contractors and a bevy of senators

on taxpayer dollars who just excised 80 billion

worth of foodstamps from the cupboards of the poor,

one fifth of the proto-type of an underdeveloped

fighter in the womb with a cleft cockpit for a palette

from an agricultural bill of privileged cronies

civilization is supposed to be based upon

like the latifundia of the homeless masses of Rome,

and twenty five million children a year

starve to death in the retractible wheel wells

of birth and death, misery, ignorance, greed

in a conservative circus of black-hearted clowns

that don’t even hand out bread anymore

to the masses distracted by the puerile views

of celebrity juveniles and senile rockstars

that pimp for the news in the refugee camps of Darfur

like the children of the Visigoths Roman slavers

bought for dogmeat until Alaric sacked the capital

and the Whore of Babylon put on the vestments of the Vatican

to put a holy spin on their self-indulgent sins of omission.

Mum to the subterfuges of virtual reality,

Wall Street screams at Main Street let them eat

genetically modified birthday cake to commemorate

inequality, fratricide, and the slow death of liberty

like a foodchain used to garotte the poor

in a reactionary response to the storming of the Bastille.

History repeats itself like communism and Karl Marx,

the first time as a tragic will to power, the second

as the black farce of free enterprise no one can afford.

The mystery of humankind. The bloodline of war.

One red thread running like a theme through it all,

A beading of skulls, rosaries, prayer-beads,

Kaiser, Caesar, Czar, if history repeats itself

it’s because it’s become a cliche of hell,

that the oppressed die first like shock troops,

cannon fodder, human folderol, in return

for killing their own off in exchange for citizenship

in a cannibal nation founded on a principle

of I eat you, now you eat me by proxy

so I can wash my hands clean of the affair

like a racist snowbank in a heat wave

trickling down the last leg of your esophogeal gutter

like an economic theory on a fire-hydrant,

as I said earlier, monostomatically, trying

to keep it together as it melts away

like an ice-cream cone toppled in the dirt

doesn’t it, as the ants, o do you see the ants coming,

millions of little jaws like colonies of tribal migrants,

the Cimri, the Goths, the Quadi, the Marcomanni,

the huddled masses, the oppressed, the poor,

as it was in Rome when their wealth began to rot

in the nostrils of the have-nots, coming

to sop you up like a dessert that will fall off its sceptre

when the inevitable garbage can lid comes off

and the rich turn holy, rendering unto Caesar

that which is Caesar’s as the state reverts

to a mercenary church for Byzantine corporations.

When the measure of a nation is the size of its cemeteries.

When human nature pulls itself up

like the lungs of its bloodroots in the Amazon

as if the fruits by which it was once known by

were no longer necessary as the nuts and berries

of why we’re here, and the healing powers

of the stars and the flowers no longer thrill us

with the loveliness of the way they cure our ills

and there’s an appetite for desecration in our wonder,

a restless ingratitude in our attitude toward life,

less mystery in the things we dream of,

more self-destructiveness than risk in the chances

we take to avoid ourselves like the words

that leave us speechless as the mouth harp

of a hyoid bone that’s run out of things to raise

the genomes of our mitochondrial mother tongues

up the stars in praise, in horror, in love,

in abysmal devotion to the future of becoming,

less the undertaker in the garden disinterring

our remains to ascertain if it were suicide or murder,

and more about the gardener in the undertaker

germinating unmodified seed metaphors

on the windowsills of our magnificent solitude

that will root like white and dark matter

in all available dimensions of the mindspace before us

as if we were all quantumly entangled like wild grapevines

in drinking the waters of life from our own prophetic skulls

and tasting the wine of our own starmud

like the mystic vintners of the light and the rain

in the eyes of the unfathomable nights

the sun shines at midnight, unaccountable as the stars,

to ripen the darkness in everyone’s flesh and blood.

PATRICK WHITE