AMONG SO MANY ATROCITIES OF HUMAN AND
INHUMAN NATURE
Among so many atrocities of human and
inhuman nature,
what forbidden grace adorns the suicide
or the ballet of the drunk
obliterated on razorwire wine at
nightfall
as the abandoned bottle exchange for
empties and grails
prays for rain to wash the acid from a
young girl’s eyes
who wanted to learn to read what
everyone else
had forgotten about taking advantage of
their fear of death
to remember how beautiful the world
once was
when the fireflies emerged like Venus
in the dusk
growing brighter as the darkness
deepened
into riotous starmaps playing charades
with a bestiary of antique zodiacs in
the crowns
of the black walnut trees whose mere
presence
was enough to astound anyone. How once
you could
open a milkweed pod like the womb of a
fortune-cookie
and find a Monarch butterfly inside
like infinite riches
in a small room, a wishing well that
wasn’t
some kind of tarpit that had just
swallowed the moon
like a cosmic glain light years before
the dragons
were allowed to carry firearms but the
mercy of the rain
that used to fall like cool tears on
their scorched wings
like leaves in a drought, without
putting the green flames
of their fires out, was strictly
forbidden by the greed
and undue influence of the lustreless
arrogance
of very mediocre men who ate like a
plague of locusts
in a field of genetically modified
stargrass
that blighted the wheat in the hand of
the Virgin
like seeds of light the wind was
forbidden to sow
and poisoned the bread we used to break
with each other
like black dwarfs of ergot on the taboo
spores
of a bad mushroom trip in the tourist
trap
of the mind blowing Eleusinian
mysteries on crack.
Apocalyptic opulence runs before the
storm
like a herald of the rich and
ungovernable
with a message to the poor who can
sense
what’s coming like the angel of death
to the door
by the way it doesn’t eat what’s
put before it
like a crumb of flesh and blood off
their own plate
they’re still willing to share, in
part, like a crust
from the empty cupboard of their heart
with any stranger who’s come in the
night
off the road, asking for directions to
Wall Street
like the parable of the man who ran to
Aleppo,
like the market share of a corporate
nemesis
who insisted upon their personhood like
a stem cell
that lied to itself posthumously in
anonymous board rooms
where issues of life and death were
settled like executive coffins
that closed the book on the matter as
if
there were no more to be said to the
press
than the obituaries they released like
doves they read from
about how much damage had been done
to their reputations by the protests of
the vociferous dead.
One false idol pushes another idiotic
ideology down
and there’s a domino effect of
apostate holy wars
that throw their children like
strawdogs
into the bonfire of the inanities to
bear witness
to the act of being worthy of their
futureless afterlives
like the strangle-hold of tapeworms,
the dry rot of termites,
the methane vapour trails of maggots in
the dungheaps
and mass graves covered in snow like
grey hair
on the skull of the body politic that
cuts its nose off
to spite its face if anybody contest
its right
to eat the eyes out of the roadkill
like blow flies
as if there were no greater vision of
life than a body bag
wrapped in a flag, placed in a hole,
with the stone of the world
resting on its chest to keep it from
rising again
like smoke from the family hearth they
buried it under.
On the borders of Rome, just before it
fell
the hungry Visigoths were compelled to
sell
their children into slavery for a
haunch of dogmeat
that used to sit under the emperor’s
table at Ravenna
and beg for scraps that fell like the
superflux of gluttons
to the bestial floor like pork in a
budget proposal
to let the poor eat their own and the
rich grow fat
on the cannon fodder at the front lines
of the war on poverty
like cattle prods and firing squads in
an abattoir,
political bloodbanks feeding on the
needs of the people
like lobbyists and leeches, ticks and
invasive species
of mosquitoes, flies, drones, killer
bees and conservatives
that suck the light out of the life,
heart, mind, spirit, will
of humans to go on surviving their own
exit
as mechanical confabulations of
metallic stem cells
with micro chips for Hox genes, oversee
the mass extinction
of life grown suspicious of its own
food supply,
the air, the water, the sun, the earth,
the sky, each other
like a hive of surveillance cameras
keeping their third eyes
on the dying wildflowers by the
polluted mindstreams
hydrophobically foaming at the mouth of
their own headwaters
like an industrial strain of rabies
eating its own rotten heart out
in a chaotic rage of conditioned
consciousness nemetically resigned
to its own lies, to the intelligent
design of its own demise.
PATRICK WHITE
