IS IT IN THE NATURE OF LIFE AND LIGHT
Is it in the nature of life and light
that if you look deeply enough into
their eyes
eventually you’ll begin to cry?
If you turn over enough skulls
in a cemetery of shepherd moons,
if you exhume enough gravestones
it’s not the angels that keep their
ancient places
but maggots in a charnel house with no
return address?
Fountainheads of enlightenment
rooted in a watershed of sorrows.
I’m tired of bringing bouquets to the
dead.
Listening to the lies we’re compelled
to tell ourselves like waterlilies in a
swamp.
Lachrymae rerum, some nights life
shrieks
like a mother that’s lost it’s only
child.
Try being blissed out in a secret
garden
in Auschwitz as if morning glory grew
on the barbed wire fence. It was ashes,
not snow
that fell on the dungheaps of human
flesh.
Lampshades of human skin that flowered
on the desks of bureaucratic offal, not
chrysanthemums.
So much innocence swept aside before it
was born
like the rape of a bride by the mirages
of power
that claim the right of prima nocta to
the waters of life
on the first night. Lion kings kill the
progeny
of the old to put their genetic seal on
things
in gules of blood on the claws of
dynastic genocides.
Disneyland specializes in pseudomorphic
fairytales for the kids.
Politics, court intrigue in a cloak of
creosote at a dogfight
for the amusement and profit of savage
fools.
Justice a screening myth for the real
play
that goes on behind the scenes the
curtain
never goes up on like the permanent fix
of an eclipse of blackflies blotting
the sun
like the inkspots of unprincipled
signatories
to see who gets which half of the
cadavers of Poland.
Hitler sleeps with Stalin. The red army
stalls
outside the abattoir of Warsaw burning
then Churchill sneaks off to the same
brothel
without telling the Americans he’s
got loose morals
as an iron curtain falls across Europe
by rhetorical arrangement.
The history of the world. Mining gold
teeth
on a battlefield. Old men and women
metastasizing their avaricious senility
by sending
the young and poor of one gutter
to redress unemployment in the slums of
another
as the factories work overtime on
behalf of the rich
on the patriotic nightshift to stick
their thumbs
in the profiteering pies of market
shares
improving the instruments of death
like a windfall of plums and cluster
bombs
the growing limbs of children play
among like Orphic dolls
you can’t call back from the dead
like the songs
you used to sing to them as they lay in
their deathbeds.
The night appalls and after sixty-four
years
of swimming in this ocean of toxic
fumaroles
I’m numbed by the effluvium of
megalomaniac volcanoes
erupting like boils of capitalitis and
commucarcinoma
of deficient immune systems on the skin
of the body politic lionizing plague
rats
according to the effect they have
on the general well-being of the
public.
The shilling under the arms of those
who died for money.
The tubal ligations of budgets like
welfare mothers
by the eunuchs and castratos of fiscal
tapeworms
against the propagation of any but
their own kind.
It blisters the eyes out of my soul to
be irradiated so.
To walk among the houses of the zodiac
alone at night
even out in the woods where death has a
more honest smell
and know it’s only the earth among
planets, fouling the footpath
with corpses it hasn’t got enough
body bags for.
Free people fighting and dying, giving
up the gift of life,
in the vital interests of a few who
take from the many
the morgue of birthrights in a time of
plenty
defended by a holy war of lies to death
against
the infidels of perjured ideals
sacrificed for the common good.
Labyrinths of vertiginous spin at Sufi
crossroads
and the crooked path out of here
baffling the starmaps
of the direction of prayer like
aluminum constellations
of confetti foiling the radar of early
warning systems
of pink mornings like cherry blossoms
in hell.
Fireflies, stars, compassion,
illumination, poetry,
the disarming generosity of genius in a
few humans
with hearts large enough to think
bigger than an ego,
wildflowers in the eyes of certain
women
who intrigued me like hidden secrets I
longed to know
like the dream grammars of sacred
syllables
in sensual temples only the wind and
the nightbirds
knew all the lyrics to. The candlepower
of mystic insights
embodied in the starmud under my
fingernails. Now
were it not to leave forensic evidence
of my homicidal silence
I don’t even want to write this in
tears of blood.
And I’m trying to hang on like a weed
that’s never known
its proper place in life except as a
cosmic diaspora
in the context of everywhere, but
they’re killing the bees
to protect the genetically modified
crops of the parasites
that own them like oil in the flour of
bad bread.
The pleonasts are abusing the
antiseptic honeys of life
with corporately commiserating
insecticides
who say, even so, in the peacetime
atrocities
perpetrated on the elemental joys that
combat
the blight of the private sadness in
the superstitious facts
of the public madness, by law, not love
of the land
nor what lives upon it, you have no
choice,
despite the stingers in the poisoned
apiary of your voice,
despite the hand you put over the
mouths of your abducted hives
to keep them from giving themselves
away
to the leaves and flowers that lie in
ambush
like judas-goats bleating to kiss them
on the cheek
like a patent on a garden on a hillside
of skulls
blessed by the money-changers on the
benches
in the the temples of life for thirty
pieces of silver
and the noose of a chromosome to hang
from
like seedless fruit in the medicine
bags of their funeral bells.
PATRICK WHITE
