YESTERDAY'S PHILOSOPHIES ARE THE JUNTAS OF TODAY

YESTERDAY’S PHILOSOPHIES ARE THE JUNTAS OF TODAY

Yesterday’s philosophies are the juntas of today.

Here comes a man who wants to lay down the law

like the Burgess Shales. You can smell him with your eyes.

You can taste the machine-guns in his psychotic heart

waking up with the birds in the dawn

like a turkey vulture waking up with a bad cough

to kill another schoolhouse full of kids

learning C stands for coffins, to prove

parasites can be every bit as murderous

as predators in the killing fields of recess.

There’s an ideological maggot in his brain

and masses of worms in his heart. He wants

a better future for flies and if he can’t get it

by rigging an election, he’ll spread it

like the hydrophobic infection of a rabid dog.

Overwhelmed, shell-shocked into indifference

as if you were sleep-shopping among bombs

in a walking coma, as if you’d lost your fig-leaf

of protective innocence and your outrage

were flatlining, having found a way to hide

and disguise yourself like the living under

the dismembered corpses of the dead. You

ever watch a kid learning to tie its shoes

if it’s got any, and remember not so long ago

that was you, before you entered this abattoir

of razorblades that cut your eyelids off

with new ideas as if you’d just come of age?

Real flesh and blood, eyes, ears, noses,

fingertips and tresses of scorched hair wrinkled

like the filaments of lightbulbs that have burnt out,

brutalized by the occluded second-guesses

of the demonic abstractions that take possession

of the human heart and drain it like a tit for hungry ghosts.

Look at the daylilies in their death shrouds

withered by famine because of the toxic death

of millions of bees in the honey-pots of the wildflowers

who couldn’t adapt to the neonicotinoids

of the counter-evolution of Frankensteinian industrial research

wrecking sex for the birds and the bees.

I’m a reasonably safe Canadian who’s hoarse

from screaming murder like a higher education

with a free medical programme in the iambs

of Greek prosody that limp across the stage

to stand out from the chorus like a critical investigation

into the interrogative nature of tragedy

when it happens to somebody else. I’ve worn

blood-caked armchairs out trying to come to terms

with all the atrocities I’ve been left out of by luck

as if I should have been on that plane

with the rest of the world so I know what

I’m talking about when I say I can feel

the pity that purges the play so much easier

than I can what it’s like to identify a child

in the wreckage by the shoes they were wearing

before they had their legs torn off like dolls

in a vendetta of cordite and political voodoo.

I’ve been a bilious witness in the slaughterhouse

of the mad monkeys with a genius for hate

that makes even the unutterable silence feel ashamed

of being one of them by genetic acclamation

whatever you say about the inoffensiveness

of my immunized humanitarianism trying

to keep the snakepit at bay like a lapwing

that really hasn’t got much of a future left

to distract it from like the fledgling afterbirth of tomorrow.

Everybody bares their fangs like the moon

to defend the foundation stones of plack

the molars of their society were established on

like the alphabet blocks of their rights and constitutions

set up like a great barrier reef of checks and balances

to govern the big fish from eating all the little ones

until recently. The atavistic wolf nature

of the corporate blue whales has gone insane

killing the krill, that’s us, they live upon.

They’re eating the foodchain like the afterbirth

of a miscarriage of their own genetically modified appetites.

Thirty years of lean cows for every pharaonic year

of fat ones. Even the moon’s taken off

too much weight. There’s no wine goblet

in my brother’s saddlebags worth stealing anymore.

A business reputation for fair dealing

is the defamation of the character of a maggot

that knows better than most corporations do

when enough is enough. And worming their way

into the rest like the basic elements of life

is just institutional pleonaxia that will eat itself to death.

PATRICK WHITE