BEEN LIED TO SO LONG THE TRUTH STICKS OUT LIKE A SORE THUMB

BEEN LIED TO SO LONG THE TRUTH STICKS OUT LIKE A SORE THUMB

Been lied to so long the truth sticks out like a sore thumb

at three in the morning on a deserted highway. I know

some of you think you’re on top of this, but look again,

for all the applause that follows you around like an encore

of professional mourners, you’re not the lightning bolt. You’re

the weathervane, you’re the desk clerk, the hat check girl

that lives like a hot tip of insider trading for pittance

as everyone stops to ask in passing, did time leave any messages?

Nothing for you, I’m sorry, as you pick your spirit up off the floor

in both hands, on either side, like the luggage of death

and make for the door hoping you don’t get caught

as if you’d just stolen the moon like a half-used bar of soap.

Stray images from estranged mindscapes, heralds of smoke

gathering like ghosts at a seance ahead of the field fire

coming this way like a scorched earth policy of scarecrows

seeking lebensraum like real estate agents in the Ukraine.

I’ll take shelter among the stars. Even in the slums of grace

the houses of the zodiac are fireproof. I’ll tune my voice

like a flame to the tongue of serpent fire that’s always

taking the bloom off the candles with their noses pressed

against the window waiting for someone they know well enough

will never come, but have grown accustomed to the absence,

and I’ll sing my heart out like the deathsong of a circumpolar dragon

on the ledge of a high precipice only the truest of lovers

have ever jumped from, scattering the ashes of their shining

on the wind to sow the emptiness with the stars and fireflies

of transmorphic constellations with more than one myth of origin.

I’m sure I’m living someone else’s solitude. What

a palatial abyss! What a hovel this is! Is there

a return address above the door? Does anyone live here

anymore? Am I the only one home? Am I

lingering in the doorway of a pathetic exit

or a grand entrance? Either way I’m lost. I end

where I began, midnight sun, new moon, Venutian Lucifer

under the eyelid of false dawn that turns me on and off

like the lightswitch of a wildflower looking for enlightenment

in the dark heart of a total eclipse that blows the candles out

so it can get a quick glimpse of what it’s waiting for.

Celestial tears of mystic chandeliers aren’t going to water

my roots deeply embedded in star mud or put out

this underground fire that seethes with life

independently of the light like a volcano in the caldera

of an oracular seabed where the dead remind the living

life’s always been more a matter of going to extremes, like breathing,

than hugging shore like a broken mirror clinging to what it reflects,

the white feather of the moon and the nightsea’s tidal regrets.

The truth isn’t sculpted out of Carrara marble like Judaic David

in a body cast with a broken arm Brunelleschi will later sew back on

once Florence isn’t Republican anymore. It’s a cave

that’s always been sand-blasted by upper class hourglasses

of gentrifying lies trying to scrub the meat-eating smell

of the Neanderthals off the walls of their hunting magic

expressed in carbon and red ochre like the secret syllables

for blood and night, to make the place more habitable

for vacationing gazelles with more time on their hands than predators.

The lesser of two lies is still pinging the short straw

on the tine of a tuning fork that bites like a snake

in the middle of a dancefloor where the roses waltz with thorns

to keep their finger on the pulse of a dead cultural life

that makes perfect sense to the unimaginative.

All the white knights have floated away like ice floes and snowmen

that couldn’t take the heat when ice came to fire

as an alternative way of destroying the dragons of the earth

and wept away what little time they had left.

I’ve never been betrayed by anyone or anything

I didn’t believe in first. I’ve cherished the worst with sly ideals.

I once thought I heard the mermaids singing to me

but it was just a pod of killerwhales disciplined by trained seals

to hit the high notes like flying fish out of their depths.

When the glass grows too dark like soot

on the third eye of an imperfectly burning lamp to see

the fireflies and stars deep within, lay the full moon

like a penny on the eyelid of your telescope,

kiss it on the forehead and wish it better dreams next time

than the nightmares it focused on in this life.

Go out to the woods late at night under the early spring stars

and from the bottom of your solitude, without

seeking an answer, speak to the ferocious clarity

of their indifference like a madman drowning in his own eyes.

PATRICK WHITE

THE GREAT SPRING NIGHT PIVOTS LIKE A PRAYERWHEEL

THE GREAT SPRING NIGHT PIVOTS LIKE A PRAYERWHEEL

The great spring night pivots like a prayerwheel

on the inconsequential circumstances and events

of an unforeseen order of chaos that doesn’t give many hints

of what’s to come. The larval nymphs of hibernial dreams,

sleepwalking through the soporific winter, comatose as snow

are stripping off their eras of clothing like space-suits

and drying their wings like stained glass straight out of the kiln

adapting to the new medium like an open window

breaking up like a miscarriage of ice in desolate bays north of here.

A pregnant pause in the air. The premature hilarity

of late revellers liberating hot tears of alcohol

on the grey acreage of the X-rated pavement down below,

where unknown movie stars write their names in wet cement.

This is the phoney war, the sitzkrieg, the false dawn of Armageddon.

The snapping turtles keep their helmets on.

Felonious spirits man the nightwatch like roosting crows.

The nemetic depths have had enough of superficial catastrophes

crying wolf every time some celebrated non entity

breaks another painted fingernail like the last crescent of the moon

just to flaunt the waning mutability of the law

as Caligula makes his horse a senator

at a see through toga party for transparent government

throwing acid in the eyes of the oracles who can see lightyears beyond

the pernicious longevity of their corporate gene pools.

The moguls, ghouls, and mutants of neo feudalism

crusading like iron chastity belts against birth control

in the lobbies of brothel hotels and banks with the room service

of slummy hospitals and debtor’s prisons for the poor.

Everybody knows they’re swimming through stone

in the cement galoshes of Al Capone as the gangsters

run for office to be of future use to their own careers.

The apple bloom of the human spirit is remedially cankered.

The northern lights that no one has ever lifted like the veils of Isis

are the delirious fever of a solar infection breaking out in sunspots

like mold on an orange. Say it isn’t so, Joe, say it isn’t so.

Yesterday’s grailquest to heal the ailing kingdom

is the dark labyrinth of today’s video game

stockpiling weapons against the expressionless zombies

of the walking dead hiding behind the coffin lids

of their homeless graves like slow-witted assassins

trying to ambush Seal Team 6 like an unemployable working class.

At this preeminent hour the street is lined with eyeless windows

into the human soul downloading an app to livestream its dreams

in high definition like a Caravaggio painting that invites you

to stick your finger in the bullet holes like a doubting Thomas

the wound in Christ’s side chalk-marked like gore on the sidewalk.

Someone’s overturning the gravestones of the angels

that kept their ancient places like a Confederate cemetery.

The barons in their hill forts look down from their overviews

surveying all they own like paranoid pleonaxiacs covetous

of their neighbour’s need to eat and live and breathe and breed

in peace as if he had a birthright to his own regeneration,

one anonymous stem cell of a creative imagination

that all else follows from of its own accord like dragonflies

and leaves on the fourth growth trees and pariahed waters of life.

The dark is supersaturated with the indolent intemperance

of vulpine rabies about to go pandemic in a hydrophobic rage

of anti-biospheric spirit enflamed by a vindictive madness

that will afflict itself on people like King Omega of the Waning Year

on a terminal ward where desolation just wants to get it over with.

Didn’t the poet say, enough, or too much? Desecration

on a crime spree against the laws of hospitality

toward strangers from the past, rape a Brazilian bus.

The stars above the yellow riverside willows coming into leaf

shine more simplistically as the subtlety of our seeing

is dumbed down by the political conditioning of watchers

watching the watchers as they hand out bread and circuses

at a black mass of wafers and viviparous passions

where every contestant regresses through the stations of virtual reality

like an anti Eleusinian mystery play based on classical mycology.

Little tree, little tree, in the Eden we can’t return to,

you’re a soft-hearted thornapple cooler than moonlight

flaking like the flesh of silver fish on a thriving lake

where water preoccupies itself with being alive.

The wisdom of the return journey’s deeper innocence

has been irrevocably lost like the peduncle

in the ensuing phylum, like an empty lifeboat

that drifted away in the fog of an unmoored moment.

The morphology of knowledge forms comes and goes

like a shapeshifter annihilating positrons

looking for God particles to attribute mass

to a Standard Model of Universal Mirages

that can be photo-shopped like a proxy of God to posterity.

Save me, save me from myself cry the chicken little prophets

who keep falling on themselves like skies caving in

to the pressure of laying enough cosmic eggs to meet

a minimum quota of sunny days to come inside.

Power, knowledge, wealth, sex, art, popularity,

Californian encounters with astonishing gods,

as serial killers return the keys to the broken washrooms

abused at roadside gas stations by people passing through

their own digestive tracts, one acidic pit stop after another,

as the wolves dig up teenage girls along the Highway of Tears in B.C.

with cyanotically blue fingernails and mass i.d.

that salves the horror of random killing with an air

of inevitability, given what some of them did for a living,

making love because they couldn’t afford to make war.

The healers are coming up with new placebos all the time

to keep up with the progress of advanced diseases of the mind

The death of so many children fingerpainting in their own blood,

a serious threat to gun rights. Boards of education,

the Praetorian guard. Day care centers at the OK corral.

A run on boomslangs and Bushmasters like Apple i pods,

while everyone sighs trying to milk the moon of human kindness

for anti-venom to undo the paralysis of a child’s mass cardiac arrest.

We’ve been shocked to death by the ferocity

of our own sins of omission trying to put a cold smile on things

like snow on a dungheap, flowers and teddy bears

on the stairs of an abattoir that puts hell with its halberds to shame.

The big fish eat the little fish and the little fish have to be armed.

Evolution is an arms race that can trace its ancestral lifelines

like a bush back to the Burgess Shale. Predatory eyes.

Soft body parts like bleeding hearts in thicker shells.

Heat seekers and siege minds with the internet wired

to their skulls like drone masters in Colorado

with their eye in the sky on the big picture

of draconian starmaps placing their zodiacs

under house arrest in zoological environments

to preserve them from going extinct before they’re questioned.

O Truman, little haberdasher, you let Pandora out of the box

like a nuclear foreign policy that turned the elemental table

against itself like a mad dog biting at its own ulcerations.

Phaeton took charge of the chariot of the sun and set fire to the earth.

Shall we take the reins of Charles’ Wain in the bread basket

of the Midwest and plough the dead under like grain

to renew the half lives of a genetically modified rebirth

as resistant to blight as Jesus in the wilderness harrowing hell

as we reverse the spin on our millenarian myths of origin

and make agriculture the civilized scapegoat for what we cultivate

in our missile siloes? Cain slew Able because his sacrifice

wasn’t acceptable and the crow scratched the earth

like a corporate farmer and said bury him here like this.

Isn’t it true? Now every time we kill a plant

we’re hunting ourselves to death like food?

Greed raised the temperature of the earth five degrees

when the planet came down with us like a fever

and Atlantis sank like an oil platform in the North Sea

all technologically failsafe sailors on board

like true captains of industry manning their executive lifeboats

while we’re left clinging like swim bladders

well over our heads in debt to anything that floats.

Apocalyptic. Martin Sheen on acid in the first scene.

Violent mandalas freaking our punched-out reflections

like spider webs having a nervous breakdown

someone might lift the veil from our face

and see once and for all what we’ve always been,

gravitational eyes shapeshifting empty space

as if, as it never isn’t, I were modelling my inspiration, my muse

into a full body life study in the nude from the inside out

and she had to stand very still in the rain,

in a thin garment of silence, just as I’m about

to say her name like a grave at the back of an orphanage.

PATRICK WHITE