EVEN HARMLESS AS DAY OLD PORRIDGE

EVEN HARMLESS AS DAY OLD PORRIDGE

Even as harmless as day old porridge no guarantee

of safety anymore, ducking down behind your anonymity

as if the one trick evolution gave you was being overlooked.

Big Brother is here, and it isn’t as if we didn’t

see him coming from a long way off. Reproach

the lighthouses. Swear you’ll keep your highbeams on.

Fall back on believing that sooner or later

everything’s that’s broken now will be amended then.

Comes the Cambrian again to the nexus

of that one atomically-timed moment

when predators acquired eyes and the prey

started armour plating their soft-bodied exposure to life

with oracular exo-skeletons like the cracks

in heated tortoise-shells. Axonic razor-wire

like a crown of thorns on the foreheads of the martyred rich.

Siege skull with a mouth for a drawbridge

it isn’t wisdom to open within hearing

of nano-tech houseflies cruising in squadrons,

observatory eyes slashed open a crack

like a paper cut envelope on a return loveletter

to look at the stars looking back from the other side

of a keyhole that looks like it was made by a bullet.

The darkest, the most exacting. Those whose playbooks

would make indifference seem like a homey word,

and you, just another example of a finely honed

stereotype grazing on your own mirages

in the climate-controlled Sahara desert

in a water-winged hourglass with nothing to drink to

like a shopping mall where the consumer is consumed

in a single gulp of greed. The snake swallows the frog.

Everybody expects to be cheated by their own birthday party.

That’s not honey in the hive. That’s a pinata

of killer bees. Who doesn’t feel swarmed?

Polarized. The laser beams copy writing rainbows

as corporate logos, lobbyists and lawyers worming

like loopholes in the misty covenant of peace

that will follow in the wake of global warming

from sea to shining sea, from Los Angeles,

o city of drowned angels, to the East Coast.

Can you teach a ghost to swim? The earth

redresses the Tao of our conditioned extremes.

Chaos swings its pendulum by the neck

in the secret rendition of a third-world dungeon.

Psychotic shadows of the curious inquisitors

burning the eyes of a telescope out

in the Court of the Star Chamber because

no one puts any credibility in the whisper

of the truth anymore unless it’s shrieking.

Spiders at the loom of the news weaving their nets

into the tapestry of the truth like prayer rugs

and flying carpets over New York in a new sci fi movie

about tourists caught off guard, sight-seeing

the garbage cans of the have-nots in the slums

and favelas of the Land of the Narcotized Dead

floating face down in the lotus garden of their toilet bowls,

or waiting for the bus, on a winter morning, to go clean

somebody else’s house of life without welcome mat of your own.

Paradigms of precisely organized atavistic insects

dressed like heavily eclipsed swat teams of robotic ants

to keep the collateral damage of the helots, the aphids,

the kamikaze heretics that prefer suicide to murder in line

with the corporate foodchain of their modified dna.

And look more like the movie for dramatic effect.

In the biogenetic labs of the alchemical farmers

flowers that were just following orders are on trial

for genocidal war crimes against the bees. Dead fish

on the shoreline of your doorstep after the oilspill

gave its word it would never happen again and again and again

like a skidmark on the dirty laundry of the earth.

Privatized slavers buying prisoners wholesale

like the children of the Visigoths for a little dog meat.

Shoot first. Then ask endless inquiries later

to keep the rest of us informed about what’s happening

to the innocent. Democratic window dressing

hung like garlands of laurel over the sacrificial manneqins

posing in front of the Lincoln Memorial to have

their pictures taken by the NSA. before they cut

the throat of their bullshit like a religious offering

to propitiate the compromised supremacy

of a human bill of rights to a televised prosecution.

Isn’t it so? Or are you still looking into the third eye

of a security camera in your bedroom, calling it

enlightenment though it replays like a snuff film

of serial killers on a red carpet at a cinematic festival

celebrating the loveless obscenity of our prime time inhumanity

to those we’re insulated from by our reality shows?

All the glossy junkmail of the news. Your political views

sponsored by feudal coalitions for a baronial charter

of divine rights against the Peasant’s Revolt.

Monsanto just bought Blackwater. Here come

the Chinese warlords. Black ops for fracking rights

and genetically engineered popcorn for all of Africa.

It takes a lot less than having your picture taken today

to have your soul stolen for good. The stars demoted,

the gods are spy satellites. Smile, you’re on Candid Camera.

Pyramidal hard drives in a desert of data resurrected

like a conspiracy theory about whistleblowing graverobbers

taking a short cut through the afterlife of a cemetery in the dark.

Be sure. Be sure. There will come an end to all of this.

Chaos out of conformative order. Messed up lives

dismembering their childhoods like celebrity voodoo dolls

in psychic theatres of the inane and absurd. Citizen Kane

and Lavrentiy Beria dating the same movie stars.

The scars on the face of the earth caught in a hurricane rose

of razorblades will heal like the shapeshifting cartography

of climate change and lakes in the wake of the storm

will open the eyes of the Sahara again to the water-gardens

of new mirages getting ready to bloom. Doom has its day

and then ends up as homeless as the rest of us

seeking shelter in the shadows of its paranoid rage.

The people are impoverished. The people are bullied and sad.

Repression. Depression. Aggression. The sewers

are roiled by the savage indignation of the bad

coming to the surface of consciousness like snapping turtles

buried in the muck of their starmud, slowly arising

like the moon out of a nightmare it’s wholly possessed by

to redress the sidereal pretentiousness of trumpeter swans.

As below. So above. Eventually. Beware the rage of the mob.

It kills without the imperial niceties of rank and distinction

like the protocol of a furious abattoir looking for signs

of its revolutionary historicity in the Sybilline Books of its blood spatter.

Civis Romanus. Cannon fodder Goths slaughtering Dacians

under the aviary of eagles on behalf of six Mafia families

fighting turf wars all over the known world like Halliburton

and Exxon to get their hands on the silvermines of Moesia,

the black camels of oil in Iraq just like the Wall Street gangs

of New York, promising illegal immigrants hunting, happiness

and home, access to a profiteering cure all for firebombing

incidental villages without hospitals like the ones they came from.

To live palatially in a place and time where you can

grow fat off the garbage of Toronto while

twenty-five million kids a year in a civilization

based on agriculture are mummified alive by starvation.

What to do? Take your fingertips off the keyboard.

Touch a rock, the skin of a lover, a baby’s hair.

Pierce the earlobe of a rose with its own thorn

and hang jewellery you made yourself

like chandeliers of rain and stars as a drop of blood

pearls like a berry of paint from the wound.

Keep the same attitude toward life as oxygen.

Break loves and fishes, if and when you can,

and throw a little salt of the earth of Mother Russia

over your left shoulder on them, and if

sometimes you have to eat bitter, black bread,

throw a little jam on it and pretend it’s

a kind of surrealistic dessert. Common sense, yes,

just enough to get by on, but rely upon your imagination

to show you a back road deeper into the woods

where you were at your most lost the last time,

when all those tears like a flashflood in a mindstream

levelled out like water seeking its own equilibrium

and you saw all those strange constellations

waiting to be named, reflected in the lowest of places.

Remain human, if only counter-intuitively.

Celebrate what’s approximate about you, rounded off,

and how wonderful it is when you put it up beside death

to second-guess what your neighbour means

by nodding your head as if you were dorning

at the Wailing Wall. Remember, arrayed as it is,

illusion too is enlightenment but don’t squint

too long into the sun or fixate on an eclipse

through a glass darkly. Compassion without reason

is wisdom. Reason without compassion

is the antic of a vindictive clown. Blood

your abstractions. Ideologies are black spots

on your heart. What’s that compared to the starmaps

you’re charting as you go along with the wind

and the sea along the coast of your own shining,

and sometimes, deep fjords where the knife went deep

into the heart of the continent. Weep when you need to,

one of the stations of your human divinity,

and when you get to the part where you laugh out loud,

buy a dove on the black market and set it free.

You’ll enlarge the sky you’re walking under that way.

Seek, but know the seeking itself is walking

in your footsteps, finding signs of you everywhere,

and when you do find something intriguing

share it. And let there be parity between your eyes

and the stars they’re getting high on, mindful

that tomorrow’s already been achieved before

the light reveals it. That what you perceive

isn’t idle reflection, or the eccentric delirium

of a dust devil wheeling at a crossroads in a desert

to see if it can dance like a Sufi, Allaho, Allaho, Allaho,

but the whole of creation itself collaborating with

your body and your mind, to see what you make of it all

when it looks through your eyes opening

on a clear mountaintop with a view of the valley below

like the prophetic skull of an observatory

gazing at the splendour of the sidereal insights

on one of the great seeing nights into human nature.

From quantum to quark, life is the substance of revelation,

not concealment, It’s got its Burgess Shales,

its Conservation of Data Principles, its black holes

and bad imitators like hydra-headed hard drives that lose

the singularity, the mystic specificity of things

like the tree of knowledge in a labyrinthine forest

that leaves them as disoriented as the north pole

in a haystack of compass needles rendered trivial

as the eyelashes of the visionary evergreens

seeding the fires of life with the incendiary urns

and ash eating furnaces of the green dragons

resting for the moment in the pagodas of the pinecones

like the crumb of a dream in the corner of an eye

blooming in the flames like the return of wildflowers,

to the burnt lands of a renewable mindscape,

coming up with new creation myths

as if we were giving names, like elders

of the Ojibway at the birth of the multiverse

in the life-mask of a child, names to the stars

like fireweed and raspberries, the perennial ephemerids

that wink like fireflies at eternity as if

a blind eye into the future could see as far

into the abyss as a Cyclops, or a one-eyed liar can

with the petrified cinder of an old growth forest

driven like a silver stake of moonlight

through the heart of a vampire caught red-handed

at a bloodbank for low albedos listening

to the audiotapes of billions of nano mosquitoes

coming to get their blood lines back, bro,

because the lowest in the foodchain always eats first.

Virgo, still a virgin in the brothels of the temple

Love with a passion whomever, whatever, whenever

you’re inspired to, wholly dispossess yourself

like a bat from a burdock, a lucky star

from the flypaper of your unwieldly attachments,

and run your hands through the goldmines

of this harvest of light rooted in the darkness

with every stalk of wheat you sow like an arrow

that already found the bull’s-eye long before

anyone were targeted by hallucinogenic missionaries

burning the libraries of Alexandria and the Incas.

Lord, spare me the deathblows of my enemies, but beat off

my apparitional friends with the jawbone of an ass

and wholly save me like a gnostic parchment of human genomes

from the assassin behind the door trying to save me from myself.

Let me fall asleep in an oracular cave somewhere

among the echoes of my poems and the afterlife

of my paintings done in red ochre for blood,

and the experienced fires of life for indelible charcoal,

and when I wake up like a dream figure in the shadows

not let me know when, why, how, or where.

Just let me marvel in wonder I’m transmorphically here at all

listening to the stars whispering to me in my own voice.

PATRICK WHITE