LIFE’S A SLOPPY BUSINESS, DAUGHTER
Life’s a sloppy business, daughter.
You
average out the crucials, adjust your
motives to the stars
that have been tinkering with you since
childbirth,
flutter your eyelashes like butterflies
over the ruins
of last year’s flowers as if you were
dropping pamphlets
over a subjugate nation, exhorting the
weeds to ideals
promoting horrid compromises with
common sense
and the general viciousness of the
world embodied
in the dispassionate vengeance of
corporate profit margins
to deny a foreign national four year
old girl
whose amateurism still trusts people’s
eyes
food, medicine, school, water, rights
to the rain
freedom from from life as a silk worm
in a garment factory run by the most
loathesome of men
in the finest clothes economic
slavery’s got to offer
as if you could wash the sewer of a
soul off
in a shower of gold that gilds you like
a maggot
in an Armani suit, or a political
tapeworm elected to public office
to feed off the poor as if it were for
their own good,
to promote prosperity in a graveyard
with mineral rights
to your bones. A Via Cloacum of
dry-eyed evil in the world
emptying into a dead sea of
consciousness like the swill
of trivialized krill, the bread and
circuses
of engineered distractions with
sunshades unfolded
like the parasols of the Roman navy as
the gutted mob
gluts on the entrails of victims
unluckier than they were
when the wasp came to lay its egg on
their forehead
and eat them less engagingly from the
inside out like worms
in their eyes and their hearts. O
savage evolution
I won’t smear sparkles on the eyelids
of the dead
you desecrate like the flesh of your
own flesh
to get on with life like an imperial
starmap of client constellations.
I suppose I should be offering you more
rounded wisdom
than this thornapple of insight into
inhuman nature,
more of a sweet-natured sunset than
this nasty false dawn
where every new beginning by
acclamation means
the death of sentience in someone else,
by the millions
throughout history, where the truth is
always deeply indebted
to the ingratiating co-sponsors of the
capitulant facts.
But I abhor sloughing the suffering of
the world off
like a soft, old man whose eyelids have
wrinkled
like the withered skin of daylilies,
who’d rather
blur and blunt his vision of life like
broken glass
sand-blasted in the gentrifying tides
of sea stars
he doesn’t want to cut his feet on
firewalking the Road of Ghosts.
I’m repulsed by the geriatric
deathmasks of strategic kindness
defrauding their own wisdom like a
gnostic gospel of cataracts
in their eyes, mystic flowers in the
sky, buffing the toxicity
of the crescents of the moon, because
the bad fang fell out
and the only one they’ve got left
they’re trying to pass off,
sensing they’re too weak to hurt
anyone anymore,
as anti-venom to the same kind of
people they’ve been
biting all their life for their place
at the table above the salt
in a snakepit cannibalizing their
wavelengths like black holes
harmonizing with the music of their
uninhabitable celestial spheres
attuned to their own background
universal hiss. Frog-swallowers
and nest-robbers trying to bury their
thorns like
the hands of a clock in the foliage of
roses that smell
like the embroidered pillowcases they
no longer dream on.
Dozy, rosey, barnboard frames,
picturing the punk and pulp
of rotten heartwood trying to rinse the
bathtub rings
the rain left like the sediment of a
dry creekbed
running through their veins like
cracked starmud
waiting for a flashflood of the shining
waters of life
to lower their blood pressure like the
first
heart attack of the spring to wake the
toads up from hibernation.
What travesties of human excellence
I’ve witnessed
in the hearts of men and women who
settled for less
than the lives they’ve been given to
live randomly
out of the blue, blue sky like an
accidental gift
of inestimable value they kept
appraising like fool’s gold
by the light of a full moon that never
came to harvest.
The mind is an artist and it is able to
paint the worlds
with great skill and subtle hues of
technical cunning
that can transform the opacity of the
solid
into the myriad translucencies of the
unimaginably real.
But, remember, you’re whole life’s
nothing
but a portrait you’re working on from
the inside.
A solitary figure in a mindscape
listening
to the picture-music of a dream grammar
that keeps shape-shifting like the
palette of a voice
trying to catch the atmospherics of
whatever mirage
you’re rendering in the watercolours
of your tears at the time
before the light in your heart changes
and your bones
are laid in a grave like the field
easel you’ve
been packing around with you all your
life
like the stick people you drew in
childhood.
Make an art of them. A masterpiece of
heart,
eye, hand, and mind. Flesh the world
out
in your own humanity and cherish it
like a life study
you modelled for yourself in the mirror
you peered into
without turning to stone at what you
saw
or asking who’s the most beautiful of
all,
but remaining true to your own eyes
like the creative bounty of a nightsky
whatever uplifts, whatever befalls your
starmud
like the nocturnal waterlilies of the
Pleiades in a low place,
or that whisper of heretical silence in
the heart
that resonates throughout the whole of
space
like the curse and the blessing of a
habitable planet
bound to the stake of a star for
remembering what it is
to be indefensibly radical about
remaining compassionately human.
PATRICK WHITE
