RELATIVELY PAINLESS DAY

RELATIVELY PAINLESS DAY

Relatively painless day. Half sunlight

smothered by grey. Don’t expect mercy

from the way life kills without regard

for the nervous system of its prey.

Sunday in a small town with thirty churches.

Secular kindness releasing oxytocin.

Civilization, not wheat, or temple,

but the fire that gathered people

with nothing but stories on their hands

while their meat cooked for easier digestion.

Bachelor buttons in the Neanderthal grave

of a child. Prophetic skulls buried under

the hearthstones like a calendar of the dead.

When did we last consult them? Now

is the hunting ground they set out alone

to discover. Envoys to the afterlife we

enacted on their advice as if it were real.

We had embassies there with paper-shredders

that called themselves priests. A new way

to eat the body of the god buried in the corner

of the field we fertilized like a ouiji board

to yield all the answers to the randomness

of the weather. Agriculture began to reform

the consumers. From now on the vines

were on trellises. The brown, gas giants

among the planets, who couldn’t shine

by a light of their own had shepherd moons.

The executioners offered anaesthetic

to the condemned man they were about to kill

and the church handed over unconfessed heretics

to the expedient firemasters of the law

at an auto-de-fe to burn. They couldn’t

have blood on their hands and live

up to the ten commandments. Or down

if you understand how arrogant hypocrites are.

They still stone women in Pakistan

for seeking knowledge as far as a cellphone,

like glass houses that have never sinned

bruising the flesh of a miscreant with

a meteor shower, space-junk in orbit,

determined to fall from their dark haloes

and wipe out a species according to the law

that lived like they had a god under their thumb.

How long does it take a thought to travel

from one neuron to the next? Or water

need a map to find its way around

an irrigation ditch, or woman be sacrificed

at the altar of her own dark mystery,

a divinely sanctioned death, paternalistic as hell,

or murder if you think it’s got nothing to do with God.

Regard the chaos of extreme conditioning.

We take the stories more seriously than

the unsayable they were meant to point out

like a negative space with an affirmative voice

that wasn’t listening to what we told ourselves

before the meat was cooked. You’re going

to sup with the devil you better eat

with a long spoon below the salt. Or there’s

no purgatory for you as if you were on

probation in death. I can’t believe as a child

I was originally sinful or that I was equally

innocent in an isolation cell. I learned

to carve loaded dice out of my bones in order

to survive to pay the slumlord who listened

to all that jive, and wondered if I did too.

I sing lullabies to lovelorn razor-blades

that took a vow on the sword they’d

placed between them to conjugate the verb

I love in Latin. In public. On the radio.

So Hux Huxley, editor of Florilegium,

cousin to Aldous and Julian, wasn’t disappointed

with the dying classics I studied with him

beside the aquarium of Australian stick insects

who didn’t know that all Corinthians

were liars at heart and I am a Corinthian

can you believe that, dedicated to getting

at the truth through a spurious art

of Moebius metaphors, like snakes

that eat themselves up to the head

and then what do they do if not go beyond that

even broken, the circle remains intact

as if the rain made it, or the tree rings

make solar systems that jump orbitals

in the heartwood of a willow that looks

better by night than at the beach by day.

I take things so seriously, boy, do I ever, I play

when things get me down in a small town on a Sunday.

PATRICK WHITE