FIREFLIES LIKE TERRORIST ACTS AGAINST
THE STARS
Fireflies like terrorist acts against
the stars.
Truth on the oyster of the tongue spun
like a grain of sand, an irritant fact
into the nacreous lustre of lies. Those
are pearls
that were his eyes, the politicians
sink so low
they’re flatworms in platform shoes.
Not a good idea to wipe your ass
with your own ideals in public. It
shocks the mob to realize their magi
are maggots.
When the mob loses face, heads roll.
The latent rage of a thousand real and
imagined ills
swarm out of the pinatas of your May
Day festivals
like the nemetic scourge of God
whipping the eyes
of the media into a frenzy of visionary
vengeance.
Paranoia becomes a civic duty and Big
Brother
no more than someone you know in the
Mafia
doesn’t give a damn whether you’re
related to him or not.
Maternal piety suckles at the poppy’s
breast
and we bleed like the dreams of
sleepwalkers
on the prophylactic precipice of the
razor’s edge.
Down below in the middens of the
rejected
the skulls of children heaped like
shepherd moons
that didn’t make the cut of random
luck
and ideological purity run amok with
inhumanity
like secret police with unlimited
budgets
to protect the state by interrogating
the genomes
of their citizenry for any mutant signs
of evolution.
The most bitter and appalled among us
profess optimism
like roses in the sunset of a mushroom
cloud
as lethal as the Angel of Death when it
rains
and amateur survivalists are
complaining of stomach pains.
Science is taught to shut its mouth by
a thug
that knows what’s good for it is also
good
for the Golden Goose that lays the
cosmic eggs
in the Eleusinian Mysteries of
dialectical materialism.
Covert telescopes replace the glass
eyes
of enlightened Cyclops with black ops
that move
like Ninjas in the night, the hashashim
of the Old Man
of the Mountain, the shining city on a
hill,
to eliminate any doubt of the positive
outcome
of imperial altruism bearing the white
man’s burden
like Coca Cola, ho, ho, ho, come like
Santa Claus to Belize,
or Shell to the arctic like the ark of
an oil platform
leaking like the shepherds of the black
camel
in the white deserts in the land of the
midnight sun.
Five billion years of astronomical
catastrophes creatively
eliminating species that weren’t
related directly to us
and the acclamation of human
consciousness as the only
mode of intelligence to make it in the
long run
like the Boston marathon through a
gauntlet
of pressure cookers that can’t stand
up on their own two legs
without cooking nails in the practical
crackhouses of hardware stores
prosthetically intent on martyring
human femurs
on a pyre of crutches you can’t throw
away like a miracle cure
at the top of the cathedral stairs you
climbed on your bleeding knees
to walk on air like a prayer to the
angels of mercy
listening like drones and satellites
high overhead
to the screams of the uncircumspect
innocent at the finish line.
Desecration, as if we were angry with
our gods
like the Mayans who burnt their temples
one day
in desperation for a famine the seven
fat kine
the untempered greed of the bankers
caused
at the end of civilization that knows
more about us
than we do it, with honey for some and
locusts for others
in a foreclosed wilderness with
radio-controlled wolves,
and nano-sized mosquitoes like puncture
wounds
at the beginning of the data chain that
leads
like breadcrumbs on the road of
knowledge suspiciously
like the photo-shopped streets of
London back to us
like a hallucinogenic reality show in
highspeed HD.
Decry something sacred, something
unanalytically
vulnerable like a misplaced faith in
the immunity
of our genetically modified mothers to
protect us
from diseases like an insurance policy
that didn’t cover us
or the honey bees o.d.ing on the
pestilential nicotinoids
that cling like smallpox to the
blankets we gave the natives
to keep warm like a guest with a fever
in the charnel house of life.
What sweetness mined like pollen from a
corpse flower
is ever going to taste like viscous
sunshine to a corporate hive
whose growing pains are always
parasitical genocide
of one kind or another? Caterpillars
against butterflies.
Pervs, perps, terrorists, ghouls and
demented one percenters
of the unbikerly kind, the mob won’t
die benignly like road kill.
Once the genuflective holiness of the
gilded shepherd’s crook
is seen by the sheep who bleated for
rescue to be what it is,
a cattle prod in an abattoir of
grain-fed coup d’etats,
you’ll be eating the meat of your
children boiled
in their mother’s milk, when the
mob’s preference
for fair-mindedness is murderously
offended like a snakepit
that was minding its own business like
Babylon at a ball game
when your bomb went off like a prelude
of the apocalypse
you so furtively desire like a plague
rat of self-hatred
seeking notoriety in the shadows of
things to come
that go boom, boom, boom, like
something infernally gargantuan
protecting her young like the
infuriated mother of mayhem.
PATRICK WHITE
