WHAT A SAD, VIOLENT LITTLE SHIT

WHAT A SAD, VIOLENT LITTLE SHIT

What a sad, violent little shit you’ve become

now that your crackin.

You talk like Michaelangelo in a quarry

selecting Carrara marble

for the translucency of its alluvial veins,

and you talk about painting with feeling,

but it’s hard to get anything done

when you’re just another Tom Thumb

crushed under a tiny avalanche of rocks

so all you ever really do

is prime the ceiling white

over and over again like a sail

when there’s not much of a wind.

I watch you trying to think,

ferocious with thought,

and it’s like watching a ball

jumping around

trying to pick up its own jacks

like the stars of the razorwire constellations

that dance like a hareem of mean angels

on the head of your pin.

Only a real prick

can scare the needle,

and little brother,

you’re not even that

under all your washaway tats

as you run like a watercolour

in the acid rain of that battery brain

you’re wired to.

Once you were full of doubt and indirection,

you didn’t know who you were

and there were tears

for other people’s sorrows

that wept like candles in elegant chandliers

and a tolerance for the folly of others

that excused your own

that made you seem

at the unlikeliest of times

compassionate and wise.

You were vulnerable.

You could be hurt,

betrayed, rejected,

and I saw in your eyes

that you had no answer for anything

when she left you like a lighthouse

without any warning.

But at least you had the courage of the morning

to get up again and zombie your way

through the rest of the day

as if Lazarus wasn’t a lie.

Now you’re all severities

of radical rock

like a mad dog

biting at its own heart

as if it were an ulcer.

And every second acephalic thought

falls like a head into the breadbasket

at the foot of the guillotine

that makes everyone edgy

about what you truly mean

when you introduce your girlfriend

like a pampered queen,

a trophy butterfly

in the plagiarized web

of an award-winning spider.

You love her like a miner

at a cocktail party

with an ice-pick,

but later when she thaws

she will stab you in the bath like Marat.

Love for you isn’t about

joy or pleasure or children,

not the hive, nor the honey.

It’s the engine

of a fanatical rampage

that fires you up

like a killer bee

to swarm any form of life

that isn’t you in the shopping mall

like a bad tatoo

that can’t make an indelible impression

on anyone

trying to have a gang life

that doesn’t bang around like you

when you sport your true colours like your girlfriend,

tricked out in black and blue

and patched with bruises

where she shoots what she uses of you

like the last crumb in the eye of a dream

you cooked in a spoon without eyelids.

Little brother, don’t come back.

Don’t sit at my table, don’t

greet me when I pass.

You’re just another scream

on fastforward, you’re

just another improvised explosive device, an i.e.d.

buried in the road you’re on

like a heart attack

waiting to happen

like Iraq to an amputee.

If once it was hard

to take the measure

of what you could have been,

like a new energy policy

that insisted on being clean,

now you’re as easy to understand

as Chernobyl or an oilslick.

You’re a spiritual polluter,

a dirty needle, just

another chrome-plated dipstick

in a motor-mouth

that runs on mystic gangrene.

PATRICK WHITE

I DON'T TRY TO ALLAY THE INEVITABLE

I DON’T TRY TO ALLAY THE INEVITABLE

I don’t try to allay the inevitable as much as I used to.

Let it come.

All my efforts are exhaustive and absurd.

I checked it out.

I’m not on the agenda.

I didn’t make the honour roll

and no matter how you dress the worm

maggots don’t turn into butterflies.

The important thing

is to wake up from conciousness

without dreaming you know who you are

or that there’s any right road to anywhere

that comes with a star.

If you want to shine,

you’ve got to learn to shine up

through the roots of everyone alike

as if there were no purpose to the light

or meaning to the flower that opens its book to the night

as if it were looking for a publisher.

I have died and died and died again

to empty myself like mirrors and rain,

focussed myself to the point of a pin

until space was the last balloon of my lonely skin

before I exploded into oblivion

to begin it all again

like an interminable birthday party

that keeps presenting me with a brain

like a watch on a gold chain

that runs too slow

to keep up with the accelerated pace

of my exponential afterlife

running like stars ahead of the light.

You can make constellations

out of anything you can see,

and franchise them all along the ecliptic

like truckstops for the longhaul planets

but the thirteenth house of the zodiac

is the only one where you can live in the moment

beyond your own future,

and before history.

You can live in clarity

with the unbegotten

of a generous mystery

that gives your life back to you

like something you might have forgotten.

You know how to be

a grain of sand in the universe,

and count yourself small and trivial

but you know nothing about

conducting yourself like the universe

in a grain of sand.

So you wash yourself

out of your own eyes in tears

and go on watering mirages in a desert

that never blooms.

You case your own house like a thief

looking for a way to break in

that doesn’t alarm the windows

that can see you coming

from a long way off

like the back of your eyes

and like the woman in the mirror

you broke into a million images of you last night,

your face reflected in a million lockets of water

that broke like a womb,

how can you be fooled

by your own disguise

and pretend there’s no one here

in this long line of mugshots

taken of you as a loser

you recognize?

You want to know how to win?

Collect on the bounty.

Turn yourself in.

There’s a price on your head

more precious than life to the dead.

PATRICK WHITE

THE EUPHORIC HIGHS

THE EUPHORIC HIGHS

The euphoric highs,

the terrifying ecstasies

don’t last too long

so why ride the comet out to the end

without reading your own doom

in what comets portend

when there’s a third extreme you’ve overlooked

in the middle

that is born of the other two?

That’s why your words

don’t have three wings

and when you’re all dolled up

like the suns’s puppet

you’re still just a snowball on strings.

And hypocrite that I am,

I love the way you can turn your heart

into a nightclub for demons on shoreleave

from an ocean of shit,

the anti-madonna

of an older religion than light

that binds the serpent to its charms

by out-tempting the apple of knowledge

with the more alluring urgencies

of a woman rebooting her flesh

before the begetting of forms.

I’m as beguiled as any of your tides

by your ebbing and flowing

and there’s no end

to the simulacra of the moon

where I have lived too long alone

like an island in the sea of shadows

waiting for your return

without believing it was possible.

Eventually everyone’s an ocean

that can’t endure its own weather

and disappointed in gravity

wanders off into space,

scars of water among stars.

Now it’s one of my strangest graces

to cry over the slightest thing

without warning

whether the bell of a sorrow

too heavy for anyone to lift,

or any human excellence

that transcends understanding.

Some people follow them like blood

and some people cut across them like veins

but the road I’m on

is as wide as it is long

and it hasn’t gone anywhere for years

but I don’t let my homelessness

exaggerate the importance

of making it back to my own heart

because if there were any love there in the first place

things are best left to do that on their own.

PATRICK WHITE

THE IMPERIOUS SHAME OF A SELF

THE IMPERIOUS SHAME OF A SELF

The imperious shame of a self

that isn’t susceptible to compassion

is a garden that refuses to root,

is ice that doesn’t know how

to thaw into itself

and exhilarate the flowers.

The fleets of the paper-boats

that get sent off in the spring

like poems and blossoms

don’t arrive with a cargo of apples.

Even the sun at midnight

can’t open your eyelids

and I’ve heard

some of your most seasoned constellations

who signed up for life

are having their tatoos removed.

Bright as you are

it’s hard to understand

why you haven’t caught on by now

you can’t drink water from a fist.

Ah, yes, the ladder;

I forgot about the ladder

you’ve been trying to walk on for years like stilts

and you’re always two rungs down

from where you think you ought to be,

but going forward

isn’t always the quickest way up

and it must be hell

leaning up against

the burning window of the world

with no one to rescue but yourself.

Besides, what happened to your feet?

Do you and the ladder ever go dancing

or the birds ever build in the rungs

or a leaf ever grow

on the dead branch you cling to

like autumn afraid to let go?

Your bitterness

is the impotence of vanity,

your ego

an egg that keeps growing bigger

to avoid escaping from itself

that nothing can fly out of free

to feather the wind

with the joy of its vagrancy.

Why don’t you lie down like a chromosome

or a bridge sometimes,

show a little spine

and let someone cross over

the abyss between you and the other

so that ditch that surrounds you

like a gaping wound

can scar up like the moon

into the open road out

of your indefensible defenses?

The puppets and the puppeteers

are manipulated

at both ends of the same strings

and when the master

aspires to ascendency

the slave arises stronger.

A fist of stone

disowned by your own mountain

what can you possess

of the valley stream

that makes its way around you

like a lion of water

roaring past your skull,

that extinguished meteorite

that mistakes itself for a Kaaba?

No cornerstone

you’re not even a pebble

to throw at the devil.

Until you can feel

someone elses’s pain as if it were your own

and effortlessly respond like the rain

the elaborately cracked creekbeds

that braille your brain

will never flash into life

nor the lightning turn you

like a winter weathervane

toward the light

that reaches into the darkness to see

how everywhere

by shining on everything alike

it has become life.

You might think you’re the jewel of jewels

in all that junkyard

of craters and crowns on the moon,

but it’s painfully obvious

by the way you’re enthroned

like a fool in the corner

of your own delusion

you’re just another trembling compass

embedded in the handle of a pocket knife

that feels surrounded by its own polarities

approaching from all directions

as if there were no point to your life.

PATRICK WHITE

WIDE OPEN NIGHT

WIDE OPEN NIGHT

Wide open night, supple and unresponsive

you come on like a cool, black pearl,

an eclipse of the mind,

to keep me from going blind.

And it hurts to think

of how I could love you and won’t.

There’s a mystic urgency in the pain

of a universe in a grain of sand

trying to catch a pyramid’s attention,

and I doubt if I’ve caught yours

though I know the names

of all your stars

and saved the first drafts

of all your pulp-fiction constellations

as if they were the fakings of a holy book.

I don’t know why

my passion for you

always ends up feeling

like the afterbirth of small nations

on third-world rations,

or worst-world cannibals

trying to teach me how to cook.

One day I’ll compile a grammar

of the indecipherable markings

on the flaring hood

of the queen cobra in the room

that bides her time

by swaying to the music

as if she were the writing on the wall.

I’ll learn to speak to you about unspeakable things

and when you smile at me

I won’t feel as if my blood

were being strained through a teatowel

like stewed blackberries

being thickened into jam.

I will be maculately clear

about who I am

and you will know

that each of us

is experiencing

the whole of the universe

in every moment

as ourselves,

and life is not more

and death is not less

than they have ever been,

that no river is flowing the wrong way to the sea,

that what you see is engendered by the unseen

and what flowers within you

is the perennial theme

of water in the mindstream

enabling forms effortlessly

along the uncontainable way of its growing

to play at being you

deep in the wells and watersheds

of your unfathomable eyes

and more lightly on the grass like dew.

PATRICK WHITE

WIDE OPEN NIGHT

WIDE OPEN NIGHT

Wide open night, supple and unresponsive

you come on like a cool, black pearl,

an eclipse of the mind,

to keep me from going blind.

And it hurts to think

of how I could love you and won’t.

There’s a mystic urgency in the pain

of a universe in a grain of sand

trying to catch a pyramid’s attention,

and I doubt if I’ve caught yours

though I know the names

of all your stars

and saved the first drafts

of all your pulp-fiction constellations

as if they were the fakings of a holy book.

I don’t know why

my passion for you

always ends up feeling

like the afterbirth of small nations

on third-world rations,

or worst-world cannibals

trying to teach me how to cook.

One day I’ll compile a grammar

of the indecipherable markings

on the flaring hood

of the queen cobra in the room

that bides her time

by swaying to the music

as if she were the writing on the wall.

I’ll learn to speak to you about unspeakable things

and when you smile at me

I won’t feel as if my blood

were being strained through a teatowel

like stewed blackberries

being thickened into jam.

I will be maculately clear

about who I am

and you will know

that each of us

is experiencing

the whole of the universe

in every moment

as ourselves,

and life is not more

and death is not less

than they have ever been,

that no river is flowing the wrong way to the sea,

that what you see is engendered by the unseen

and what flowers within you

is the perennial theme

of water in the mindstream

enabling forms effortlessly

along the uncontainable way of its growing

to play at being you

deep in the wells and watersheds

of your unfathomable eyes

and more lightly on the grass like dew.

PATRICK WHITE

WIDE OPEN NIGHT

WIDE OPEN NIGHT

Wide open night, supple and unresponsive

you come on like a cool, black pearl,

an eclipse of the mind,

to keep me from going blind.

And it hurts to think

of how I could love you and won’t.

There’s a mystic urgency in the pain

of a universe in a grain of sand

trying to catch a pyramid’s attention,

and I doubt if I’ve caught yours

though I know the names

of all your stars

and saved the first drafts

of all your pulp-fiction constellations

as if they were the fakings of a holy book.

I don’t know why

my passion for you

always ends up feeling

like the afterbirth of small nations

on third-world rations,

or worst-world cannibals

trying to teach me how to cook.

One day I’ll compile a grammar

of the indecipherable markings

on the flaring hood

of the queen cobra in the room

that bides her time

by swaying to the music

as if she were the writing on the wall.

I’ll learn to speak to you about unspeakable things

and when you smile at me

I won’t feel as if my blood

were being strained through a teatowel

like stewed blackberries

being thickened into jam.

I will be maculately clear

about who I am

and you will know

that each of us

is experiencing

the whole of the universe

in every moment

as ourselves,

and life is not more

and death is not less

than they have ever been,

that no river is flowing the wrong way to the sea,

that what you see is engendered by the unseen

and what flowers within you

is the perennial theme

of water in the mindstream

enabling forms effortlessly

along the uncontainable way of its growing

to play at being you

deep in the wells and watersheds

of your unfathomable eyes

and more lightly on the grass like dew.

PATRICK WHITE