GREAT PAN IS DEAD
Great pan is dead and a frenzied terror
spread over
the Greco-Roman world like the abysmal
dread of nothing
as two and a half millennia later the
god of the Christocentrics
expired for not living up to its
mythically inflated reputation
for resurrection and gentleness.
Corporations are people, too.
La, la, etc. Is it a sin to lie to the
dead? Who took
God’s confession on his deathbed? Was
he forgiven
for the deathmasks of horror he wore
like the black robes
and executioner’s hoods of the Court
of the Star Chamber
of the sexually sadistic Inquisition?
Psychotic thought police
in a world without the internet,
despite the connectivity
of all life to the same convulsive
nervous system on the rack,
a hundred thousand women burned at the
stake
for witchcraft in the seventeenth
century like a holy act
to keep the aniconic dream grammars of
their blackest magic
from contaminating the superstitious
demotic of the common people
who stood by and watched the flesh drip
off their bodies like candles
as if something rigorously severe and
good had been done here.
Loopholes in the lobbyists of the law
they hung themselves with
like the old woman to whom was given a
strong rope
as Muhammad whom the Muslims aren’t
listening to
pointed out as an example of what not
to do,
who unwound it into a thousand and one
weak threads
like Sunnis and Shias trying to
decapitate each other’s heads
before wisdom reached for the henna to
die their hair
red with blood. I don’t think Leo the
Tenth was what
Jesus meant, or Muhammad would marry
his daughter
to Muqtada al Sadr as the Taliban
murder Fatima
at the Battle of the Camel for learning
to read the Koran
straight from the lips of Allah. Did
you forget Muhammad
liked prayer, women, and perfume best,
not the smell
of cordite, misogyny, the revenge of
the cursed upon the blessed.
Your mother, your mother, your mother,
then your father,
knows, haqq al yaquin, with certainty
of sight,
what it’s like to carry you in her
womb, from a gob of starmud
to the improvised explosive device of a
terrorist
going supernova in the marketplace
where she shopped
for your food, as if she gave a fig
about how she raised you,
Allahu akbar, to surrender to a god,
bismallah, ar Rahman, ar Rahim,
with a will greater than your own.
Alif, baa, taa, thaa, jim,
as if the word were still mightier than
your AK-47’s magazine.
You make orphans and widows of the life
you were charged to protect as
mujahdeen.
Are the refugees still leaving Mecca
for Medina?
Read the Hadith with your sister. Don’t
you get the impression
Muhammad was a man with humanity and
compassion you’d like to meet,
or give up your seat for on a bus, or
run a foot race with
as if you were creatively competing
with the spirit
of the female principle of Aisha in all
of us, keeping us alive
like the roses of Shiraz or the mole on
a young slave girl’s cheek
in Samarkand, the mighty capitol of
Timur the Lame Khan.
Spare me the lectures, the details, the
fatwahs, the sermons,
the theological alibis, the Hanbali
miscegenations,
the creationist lies in the dark ages
of the nightschools
of Texas and North Carolina. I seek
knowledge
like evolution even as far as China,
that Sufi state
of mind, or Ardoch, Ontario, where the
crows squabble
like creosote in the Selkirk chimney
pots of the cold morning.
And as I’ve grown foolishly into a
wisdom unbefitting my age
I remember to be grateful for my
ignorance as much as I am
for everything that didn’t happen but
could have
like something I deserved more than it
was willing
to rat me out for. I don’t make a
sacrifice to myself
like Wodin on the axis mundi, or Jesus
on the cross,
of the people I fall in love with like
tares and wild asters
in the starfields that keep expanding
my imagination
like dark energy in the subconscious
coalbins
of a diamond cutter’s eye for the
facets of translucency
that pass through me like spearheads of
the chandeliers
that light up the waters of life with
luminous tears of glass
that fall like polished lenses of rain
into the housewells
of the Palace of Versailles, or even,
more profoundly,
the black reflection of the Taj Mahal
in a momento mori
of mystically erotic moonlight,
everything opening
and closing like waterlilies and
uncultivated orchids,
each according to their own unique
waterclocks
with a sense of timing absolutely
crucial
to the relativity of their contents
revealed
like a unified field theory love
longing for the superlative
discovered lightyears ago when everyone
was looking the other way like gods at
a thief stealing their fire
right from under their eyes like the
industrial secret
of a burning dove on a midnight shift
of factory stars
creating the heavier elements of life
like your starmud
in a flood of light that made
everything more obviously clear
than the false dawn in the apple core
of your nuclear reactor.
Wash your eyes clean of your self in
tears, stop mourning
your mirages because they disappear
like mirrors into the dark
to show you what a real constellation
looks like
when Gabriel-Jabreel turns on the
lights in the seventh heaven
as if the picture-music’s never over,
and death
isn’t a curfew imposed on when you
leave or not
with someone you love as if you’d
never met before
but in truth, when the iris in her eyes
unlocks
the security alarms on your heart, you
forgot, didn’t you,
she was the blessing you swore on your
holy life never to?
How many plane loads of pilgrims ago
was that?
How many Arab villages of gore can be
crammed
into the psyche of a video game in an
abattoir
as killing takes on the lifestyle of
G.I. Joe gone
mercenary in the Hundred Years War for
oil
as the fourth estate of the Vatican and
France
foam at the mouth like rabid dogs to
foment
a holy war to clear the garbage out of
Europe
by murdering their way into being made
men,
capos in the Mafia of paradise, first,
by slaughtering
the Albigensians, then greasing
Jerusalem in human fat
and the blood of a gang-raped rose that
hemorrhaged
like a virgin with immaculate
conceptions of love?
Villains, villains, villains, villains
everywhere, black
and white, fundamental, lock, load,
fire,
no trembling, no doubt, no hesitation,
dead eye
on the target, boom, and your Freudian
phallus,
ejaculates like an apocalyptic moment
of sexual devotion
to the stone age of a gun that’s
still just a rock or a bone
in the hands of a chimpanzee going
ballistic
though it’s the weapons that have
evolved, not
the apes that use them like a flying
buttress or a crutch
to keep their end of things up like a
penis on a gargoyle
on a Gothic cathedral of
sado-masochistic ideals.
Great Pan is dead. God is dead. The
Mahdi
hasn’t shown up in over a hundred
years, Moses
is too old to go up the mountain again
and Jesus,
though he is supposed to for Muslims
and Christians alike
isn’t coming back to this mad house
for love of a second life
no way, no how, never again, after
Birkenau
and the Khmer Rouge in the killing
fields of Laos,
after Damascus and Baghdad, Sabra,
Shatila,
after Aurora, Newtown and the wells of
Deir Yasin,
Wall Street, the big, tough,
dumbed-down, fanatical Republicans
spitting Obamacare out of their mouths
like vicious brats
that can’t take their own medicine,
and wouldn’t
save a kid’s life if it cast a shadow
of compassion
on the baksheesh of the profit margins
of their fascist ideologies
goose-stepping to the corporate
boom-times of an oil drum
humping the shepherds of the black
camel like a Sufi sign
of the end times. Hell is Judgement Day
left to our own discretion.
Hell is a pharmaceutical company
letting hundreds of thousands
in Africa die by denying them the
medicine they need
to stay alive, just to keep the price
high in Pakistan and India.
Hell is a mediocrity perniciously
opposed to any standard
of human excellence that might show it
up by contrast
for what it is to the mob it’s trying
to involve
in a conspiracy of shadows against its
own enlightenment.
Hell makes it a crime to break loaves
and fishes on a hillside
like food stamps for the victims of the
biblical famines
of the New York Stock Exchange and the
thick batter of fat
the rich insulate their white collar
hearts in to perpetrate
their gluttony like a board room crime
against humanity.
Money mints the human like
counterfeiters in the spring.
Cash flows like green foliage but no
birds sing.
Slumlords alienate the humanism of
their daughters.
Sons dread the prospect of becoming
their fathers.
You get the picture, the litany of
horrors. Hell
looks like any other day on earth, the
politicians
trivializing the desecration of
millions as a matter
of policy to humiliate and deprive the
people
trying to hate them out of office as a
rejection
of their ravenous, clumsy, sexually
inept egos.
Big vacuum. Void. Bardo state. Gap
between
cosmic neurons. First we string our
spinal cords
like spider silk between opposites,
then we lie down
like suspension bridges, or the sky
goddess Nut
for others to cross to the other side
of the firewalking thresholds we are,
because
things have a way of burning behind us
don’t they?
Bored with the dialectical history of
themselves,
conceptual shadow lives of flesh and
blood,
they turn the light around, invariably,
and it’s
as dark as midnight at noon, a diamond
in a heart of coal,
when the dusk plays false with its
beginning
and the dawn gets involved in a whole,
new love affair
as if the first and the last were
quantumly entangled
in other’s wavelengths like the
Pleiades among the willows
stripped bare of their sorrows like
black queens
in a beehive of light making honey out
of the darkness
in the starfields of the magnificent
wildflowers
spreading like fireweed through our
baleful herb gardens
as slowly the future devolves into its
arcane tomorrows.
PATRICK WHITE
