EVERYBODY KNOWS WHY THE CHILDREN ARE HUNGRY

EVERYBODY KNOWS WHY THE CHILDREN ARE HUNGRY

 

Everybody knows why the children are hungry.

Everybody knows why the poor give up dreaming

and the rich can’t sleep without surveillance.

Everybody knows why this young girl can’t read

and the Taliban throw acid in her face.

Everybody knows why this young boy

at twelve years old

feels about as heroic as a statistic

and looks at the future as if

he were already a has-been.

Everybody knows why there’s a rifle in his hand.

Everybody knows why

there are people washed up

on the streets of our cities

as if a great ship of state had gone down

like a garbage barge off the coast of New Jersey.

Everybody knows why

women are being sexually colonized

in the Democratic Republic of the mineral-rich Congo.

Everybody knows their atrocities

like serial killers and baseball cards.

You read a lot of existentialism

that prefers existence to essence

but you still find it hard to picture the abyss

that defines being as a special case of nothingness:

look into a dead child’s eyes

look into a dead child’s mind

look at what she cherished about life

like a cosmology all of her own

a myth of origin

a reason for stars

rejected by the metaphysics of the flies

that gather like punctuation marks all over her eyes.

Everybody knows

why the truth is veiled in spider-webs

that are maintained like political systems

who let the few who know how to spin silk out of their ass

eat everyone.

New eyes for old lamps

here comes this year’s candidates

like autumn to the ballot-box

like worms to a windfall of apples

to improve the lives of illegal immigrants

by privatizing concentration camps.

Everybody wants to stick their thumb in plum pudding

and say what a good boy am I

and everybody forgets who they stole it from

and everybody regrets that they didn’t get caught

in time to do it all over again

as they address themselves like greed

to a nation of gluttons

about what to do about the hungry

at the back door of the world

living on the leftovers

of liposuction clinics for the rich.

Three quarters of the world’s resources on your plate

taken out of other people’s mouths

and their children washing your table-cloth

to get the worst of the blood stains out

and you wonder why

you’re threatened by the fact

that people are hungry

and all they can see in your indifference

is their destiny.

Hate manipulates

the economics of fate

and the harvest moon is eclipsed

by the shadow of your dinner plate

all over the world tonight

as you go to bed full and happy

you’re rich enough to have values

that can be bought and sold

in a free market.

Hell’s reserved a table

in the dark corner

of an exotic place for you

that serves just those

who were exalted

by great all-consuming souls

that knew how to keep faith with a menu

that had children with cannibal soup on it.

And if hell doesn’t exist anymore

because so many atrocities have put it to shame

and peace is just another black hole

in the eye of an approaching hurricane

then may your soul be subjected

to the same vicious clarity

that cooked the books

like bestsellers in heaven

that always had a happy ending

like a tax return on charity.

The Holy Ghost was first

a Greek lawyer

a paraclete

an advocatus

someone who would speak up for you

who would intercede on your behalf

after you died

and went before

Rhadamanthus Anubis God or provincial court

to see if there was a feather’s-weight of good in you.

Now the Holy Ghost is a campaign manager

for a Christo-Fascist rightwing conservative think tank

with the i.q. of a snakepit 

running for the office of God

by denoucing charity

as a socio-economic liberal fraud

and a green policy in Eden

as the beginnings of a police state

that will take away your right

to be psychpathically delusional about clarity.

Granny Smith Macintosh or Golden Delicious

Satan invited Eve

to take a big bite out of the apple

just for a little variety

but the neocon Nazis have taken it

a step further than that

and stuffed themselves

like maggots

into the vicious crabapples

they’ve stewed under the crust

of their North American piety

like a taste of downhome cooking you can trust.

But trust me

they’re lick-spittle ass vacuums

that will be spit out

like something nature abhors.

Everybody knows why the children are hungry.

There are people in the world

whose values are the apple cores

of a trickle-down economy

that begrudges the poor even that.

Everybody knows that the game is fixed

and elections are Mexican pinatas

beaten to a pulp at the ballot box

to keep foreigners out of our customs

like the roots of strange lands out of our food.

Everybody knows

why the world is a dangerous place

and the only thing our children can do

is stick needles in their arms

to stay out of harm’s way.

Everybody knows why the old

are left to die alone without dignity

in a world where experience

is a kind of pyschological abuse

and wisdom the chronic ambiguity of a victim.

I see a war.

Between those

who have nothing to lose

and the darlings of superfluity

who live off the rest of everything

that belongs to everyone else.

Nasty guerilla gunboat wars

like blood clots in the collective unconcious

ignited by true believers

on both sides of the fence

with the spontaneity

of improvised explosive devices

and the apocalyptic insights of fanatical drones.

More bang for the buck.

More corporate spin

for those who don’t give a fuck.

Everybody knows why the planet feels

like a sexually assaulted woman

with no shelters or restraining orders

to hear her appeals for help.

We shut our mouths like doors.

We close our eyes like windows.

We stuff our ears with loud music

to keep from hearing

how she screams our names out loud

as if there were still some heroes left

among all her shameless children

that weren’t legendary

for their sins of omission.

The planet is one body.

The planet is one mind.

If your little toe gets gangrene like Somalia

and you do nothing about it

given time for the disease to progress

California will go blind

and Tokyo go into cardiac arrest.

If a child loses an eye

that’s one less star in the sky

for the lost to find their way back by.

If a student is killed for an idea

by the Neanderthals of creationism

standing up for a time-honoured ice-age

against the proponents of global warming

that’s proof that humans were created in the image of God

like a missing link in the brain drain of evolution

that never flushes the think-tank

after it’s done its business

like other species that have gone extinct

abusing their own awareness.

But I’ve got a way out of the argument.

It isn’t evolution or creationism

that governs the direction of events

among all living things on the planet.

It’s eliminationism.

Murder in the name of self-defense.

Genocide in the name of purifying the race.

Theft in the name of giving back.

Lying as a way of upholding the truth.

Rape as a way of making love.

Iron pyrite as the standard of the Golden Rule.

Do unto others before they do unto you.

Jesus overthrew the benches of the money-lenders in the temple.

The Vatican’s got a bank.

Wisdom as the think-tank of the fool.

When the meaning of life is insignificant

so is its lack of meaning too.

Compassion as heartfelt as a foreign policy.

Desecration as the true aesthetic of celebrity.

Horror takes a short-cut to fame

and leaves the long way home to the hero.

War as a way of imposing peace.

Starvation poverty disease clean water air and arable land

beaten like old ploughs

into the new weapons

of a corporate arsenal.

Nike owns the rain in Bolivia

and Coca Cola’s

the corporate Magna Carta of Belize.

You’re the nobody everybody’s watching

like the someone they should be afraid of

who’s watching you.

Profligate variety the vacillating substitute for choice.

The bride wore black at the wedding

to celebrate her marriage to an oilslick

like moonlight that landed a big eclipse

and the mutant sex life of a polluted fish.

There’s honey in the orchards that broke their vows

and money in doing what you hate

for the best of reasons.

One half the world is grass.

The other half is grazers.

There are children who suckle

at their dead mothers’ breasts

like Hathor the cosmic cash-cow

when she crashed on Wall Street

like a fall in the price of meat.

The promised land of milk and honey

is a profit margin on the edge of the sea

looking for big returns on its spiritual dividends.

The ends don’t justify the means anymore.

The means are the ends.

Like the children

that are dynastically slaughtered

to keep Herod from having bad dreams

about the birth-rate of immaculate Palestinian virgins.

Lord won’t you send me an M-16.

My friends all have Mausers

and AK-47s.

The conspiracy theorists

of the justifiably paranoid

look at a tree

and see an underground arboreal organization.

The crazy try to keep the mad from going insane.

Everyone’s dining with Claudius on poison mushrooms.

Nero waits in the wings

like the Elvis Presly of emperors

and sings of all the things

he’s going to do to the Christians

with a blast from the past

and a little number

he took from the beast

that rose to six six six on the charts

for drowning their children

and drinking the blood of a god

who rose from the dead on the third day

like Marianne Faithful making a comeback.

And everybody knows why the children are hungry.

Everybody knows the big bad wolves

caught up to their toes

and blew their house down

and ate them like little piggies.

Everybody knows where the cradle crashed

and how many millions of children there were on board

when the wind blew the treetops out like candles.

But everybody plays dumb and mute and stupid

and says they’re still looking for the black box

to determine what caused the tragedy

and possibly in the future

make sure that it won’t probably happen again.

Everybody knows there are maggots in Armani suits

pimped out like butterflies

to misrepresent themselves to the people

in the voice of an experienced apple

who knows how to make the hard choices

when it gets down to taking a bite out of the budget.

Corruption always persecutes virtue

for falling into fiscal arrears

when it should have known

like any good snakeoil salesman

it just couldn’t keep up

with the luxurious lifestyle of its tears.

Mirrors within mirrors within mirrors

and not one them bright enough

to reflect the dark truth

of why children just hundreds of miles away

from a supermarket and a health plan

look like the fossils of pterodactyls

in the last stages of late Triassic starvation.

All skin and bones

with big eyes like bat kites

tangled in the powerlines

of the economic spider grid of a world

that separates the flies

the gods kill for sport

from the bureaucrats and politicians

that deny any knowledge of their crimes

in a marsupial court

where everyone else

is in everyone else’s pocket.

Wanton boys pull the wings off the fly.

The fly kills them with germs.

Everybody knows why their heart squirms

when they shake out the garbage can

like a cornucopia full of worms

that have grown fat and chubby as commas

on the flesh of illiterate children

that didn’t live long enough

to learn to count the dead

without using their fingers and toes.

The tooth fairy’s turned into a terrorist

that puts homemade explosives

under the pillows of stone

the children lay their heads down on

shaking in their deathbeds

to scream in their dreams about things

that were better left unsaid.

Everybody knows why the damage to our children

is always a collateral

and never a capital offense.

A prosthetic footnote to a roadside bomb.

A small pale blossom of a face

in the cosmic expanse

of an adult-sized tomb

that casts monstrous shadows

on the walls of the room

she sleeps alone in

without any sign from heaven

that anyone knows she’s dead.

All her lucky stars

swept like tragic dust under the bed

where she’s hiding

from everyone who knows why

and doesn’t come looking.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

YOU WERE THE INTIMACY

YOU WERE THE INTIMACY

 

You were the intimacy

of the things I loved

that were so impossibly far away

I could never reach out and touch them

except by touching you.

In the long silence of these past thirty-seven years

I have never been able to look at people again

the way I used to see them before I met you.

There’s a fear in the way I love them

that I learned

from living your absence.

A deep black wounded space within

that has sadly outgrown the stars

like October outlives its fireflies.

And every threshold I’ve crossed ever since

has turned into a long road

with a precipice at the end of my spinal cord

swaying like the first night I met you

on the Capilano Suspension Bridge

and you said

the only way

to overcome your fear of falling

is to have the courage to jump.

And I laughed and said

staring into the gorge

and the thin silver water down below

what’s to fear

if you know how to fall toward paradise?

And you knew right away

I was your kind of challenge.

And I knew you wanted

to sword-dance with razorblades

you laid out like the Tarot

later back at your place

as if you wanted to convince yourself

you were still silly enough to believe in tomorrow.

The candle beside the cards on the floor

didn’t turn out to be

enough of a lighthouse

to warn us of the approaching storm.

We were sincere in the darkness

for a little while

astounded by the expert innocence

of our mindless flesh.

You shone like the sun at midnight

and I came undone like Icarus

to prove I was falling

without regrets

like a spent star

into the singularity

of a whole new universe

where everything that didn’t happen in this one

came uncannily true in the next

for both of us

as if we were at last worthy

in each others’ arms

of our own happiness.

When happiness is brave

it’s bliss.

And when it’s afraid

there’s nothing sadder

than a gift that was never opened.

Joy is a warrior that risked hoping

there was nothing left dying for.

Sorrow comes up with a million reasons.

The only way of life

is not making a way of life.

Nor making

not making a way of life

a way.

One day you just get off the road

and start taking the long way home through the starfields.

You stop looking in the mirror

to see if you still have eyes.

For years after your death

no matter what I looked at

I always saw the same thing.

The black clarity

of your existential absence

staring me in the face

without turning me into stone

because that would have been mercy.

Try how I might

I could never quite

shut the lid on your coffin

or accept

that you were buried in me for good

or that my blood burned

like the infernal red

of an emergency exit

to show me the way out

of heaven and hell

by falling on them both

like a two-edged sword

that killed me deeper into life

than your death ever did.

Either life’s unfair

or I’m not man enough

to live up to your suicide

but I remember how I used to love

feeling the weight

of the nightstream of your hair

as it poured through my hand

like a landscape that could feel

for the first time in a long time

water running in the dry creekbeds of its lifelines.

Things woke up.

And I saw the flowers

among the thorns

that had been guarding them

like the secret names of God

you had to know

to get  past the burning angels

through the gates

of your sad return to Eden alone.

The eloquence of your flesh

when you walked on the earth

as if your heart danced to your blood

like an old song we both knew

now a broken harp of bone

a wounded guitar

someone laid down for good.

A prophetic skull

without a future

anyone can foretell.

The full moon going down

like a spare penny

into a dry wishing well.

Me looking at the dark hills

like the contours of your corpse laid out

under a collapsed tent

as they wheeled you into the ambulance

to spend your first vast impossibly long night in the morgue

among the dead

who don’t catch their breath

or break their bodies like bread

alone in the stillness

that can’t distinguish one death from another.

However I wept for you

all the hard bitter baffled tears

all the sweet radiant wellsprings

that washed the dust like stars

off the wings of the birds

that had laboured to carry the souls of the dead

far to the west

when I remembered

how blessed I really was

that things had been

so beautifully dangerous for awhile.

And all the dark fathomless watersheds of lucidity

I drowned in like a eye in a grail

looking for butterflies in a suicide note.

All the black pearls

the diamond skulls

the eclipsed chalices

all the precious jewels of my grieving

that death hoarded underground

nothing in the end

but nameless water

frozen between the cracks

of a gravestone as old as the moon.

I remember how I loved your ice-blue eyes

and how they burned with an Arctic clarity

you had to dress warmly for

if you didn’t want to suffer from frost-bite

but there’s more nightshade in them now

than chicory

when I look into them like tundral flowers

and the light turns hurtful and eerie

when I recall how the melting snow

washed itself clean of itself

all those years ago

when we didn’t know

what all this meant.

It’s of little relevance

that we once loved each other

the way we did

and once you’ve exhausted

the meaning of signs

like galaxies expanding

ever more deeply into space

less significance.

What does it look like from Mars?

Your death was a koan

not a fortune-cookie

and the koan broke me

like a man it couldn’t understand

rationally.

There is no scar for you.

You will always be

this open wound inside of me.

When I look at the stars

I can’t dissociate beauty from absurdity.

I cherish their clarity

as something that can’t be

contaminated by my eyes

when they’re nothing

but two black holes in space

a snake-bite of the light

in the middle of my face

like a colon without the following:

the kind of faith

that makes what little is left

so incommensurably greater than what’s been lost.

I can see the blue morning glory in the garden

as if moonlight had turned to skin

just to feel what it’s like to flower

but I can’t forget the frost

that fell like your death over all of it

when I went so numb

space turned into glass

and time pulled the blind down on the window.

I closed my eyes like a mirror

content to let the stars make sense

of their own reflections.

I gave up on directions

and burned my starmaps

and followed who I was

without caring what I became.

Absolutes of ice

spread like cataracts

over the relativities of the river

that went on flowing

as if nothing had changed

and my life was still a dream without eyelids.

A ghost would be easier to deal with

than the fact

that you don’t exist anymore

except as bare bones

denuded of the world

like yarrow sticks

thrown before the Book of Changes.

But then I expect

you’d exorcise yourself

at a suggestion of the night

that the stars would be so much brighter

if you only blew out the candleflame.

You’d do it just to see

if things got better.

You’d leave me in the dark again

staring at the stars

like white ink

on a black loveletter

you left unsigned

as you disappeared into death

like your last breath on a cold windowpane.

I’ve long since forgiven you my solitude.

I’ve long since forgiven you

the severity of the wisdom

that hardened my eyes

like diamonds in the darkness

that could cut through anything

except my attachment to you.

I have forgiven you

for the way I have grown through suffering

to realize

how much I owe your death

and the terrible eyeless abyss that followed it

like an enlightened insight

into the impersonal nature of compassion.

I have forgiven you

the way I am spontaneously compelled

to love a world that is so estranged from me

I feel like water on the moon

trying to imagine what it must be like

to fall like rain on the intimate earth

with a reasonable expectation

of coming up flowers

that weren’t destined

to be laid on your grave.

I’ve gone grey gathering them up

and bringing them to you

like bouquets of paints and brushes

that are ready at hand

should you ever wish

to pick them up again

and show me what the world looks like

without a body for a picture-frame

as you play the part of the upstart genius

who lived the black farce of creative pain

like the agony of the wick

burning at the stake like a heretic

between the flesh of the wax

and the spiritual aspirations of the candleflame

thrusting spears into space at the stars

as if the only way you could ever know God

if you ever met up

was by the scars.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

LIFE'S A GENIUS

LIFE’S A GENIUS

 

for Alysia to read with her first coffee of the day

 

Life’s a genius.

Not a mediocrity

looking for reasons to live in the morning.

Life’s not a plan. 

It’s a spirit that doesn’t need one

whether things go right or wrong.

Life is light and water.

It delights in going everywhere at once.

Mediocrities have genius

but they don’t know how

to play with it like a child.

Their eyes peek

through knotholes in the fence

but they sacrifice their longing

on the convential altars of common-sense

and never throw the ball back over the hills

like the moon coming up

or the sun going down

without worrying about

breaking the neighbours’windows.

Life throws whole mountains around

and turns the cornerstones into quicksand

and goes down with Atlantis

only to come up again like Moby Dick

spewing stars out of its blowhole.

Mediocrity has its feet planted firmly on the ground.

It never goes anywhere it hasn’t gone before.

It’s the kind of fire

that sleeps with an extinquisher

in case things get too hot to put out.

Mediocrity shares.

But life’s the kind of genius

that gives like an apple-tree

that fully expresses itself

through infinitely more

than four seasons

no two alike

without caring if it’s of any benefit to anyone.

Mediocrity’s stunned by the blossoms.

Genius tastes the fruit.

Life’s the kind of fire

that doesn’t have a root

you can pull up and take home with you

to add to your garden

like a new word to your vocabulary.

Mediocrity spells it out.

But genius is the dream grammar

of a spiritual alphabet

that isn’t used to taking orders.

It doesn’t have twenty-six words for inspiration

like potted geraniums all in a row

and only one for freedom

it weeds out like morning glory

and dandelions

whose vagrancy threatens

to overwhelm the rest

with a longing

for the happier memories of their homelessness.

Mediocrity’s a highway lined with roadkill.

Genius is a river

that goes around

not through the hill

and though there are fleets of waterlilies all along its banks

that gather like the Spanish Armada every year

to burn the infidel irises on the far shore

back into the true church

they never set sail.

They stay anchored to the coast

like loveletters from buddhas upstream

rooted in the flowing.

Mediocrity writes a great poem.

Genius lets the poem write itself.

Mediocrity signs its own vanity.

like a work done well.

But genius doesn’t have

anything to sell

that ever belonged to anyone

in the first place.

Life is the generosity of space

that blows stars in your face

and gives you the eyes to see them.

Mediocrity confines the muses to a hareem

to compel their obedience.

Mediocrity is a great sea without any tides.

Genius sleeps with women

it never thinks of as brides

because it can feel their power

like a waterbird feels the waves

breathing like the sea beneath it

wild and profound

cannibal creators

oceans in the black rose

dripping like the blood

of enlightened virgins

from Kali the Crone Destroyer’s mouth

eating her own like the moon

as if she were life itself.

Mediocrity never includes

enough destruction in its creations

to be credible.

It goes along with the swans

like afterlives in the moonlight

but not the snapping turtles

that drag them down into the mud

like constellations brought back to earth like kites.

Mediocrity defangs the moon.

Genius flows down

its first and last crescents like blood

knowing one fang kills you

and the other heals you for good.

Mediocrity is hemmed in

by thresholds it never crosses.

It never colours outside the lines

into the negative space

of the forbidden white beyond.

It’s never gone gone gone forever gone beyond.

It’s a star with a lazy eye in an expanding universe.

It never reads the writing on the wall

between the lines

like fossils.

It’s afraid of the dark.

It fills whole galleries

with works like arks

with two of every kind

that are signed like truces

it made with its imagination

as if the imagination

ever kept its word

to anyone who was afraid of it.

Mediocrity keeps an eye on itself

like a documentary.

It comes to the right door

but it never gains entry.

It’s lost in the labyrinth

of its own fingerprints.

It leaves too much evidence

at the scene of the crime

and turns over on genius

at the drop of a dime

for getting away with everything

like the mastermind behind it all.

Mediocrity sings like a canary in a coal-mine.

Genius howls at the moon

among the mountains

high above the timberline

where she takes

her first and last crescents off

like handcuffs off an escaped convict.

Mediocrity lives

as if it’s always

making up an alibi

for something it never did.

It’s easier to lie about a sin of omission

than it is to tell the truth

as if it you weren’t signing

a celebrity confession.

Genius lives out in the open

where everything’s well hid

like a masonjar full of fireflies

without a lid.

Mediocrity hugs the shore

like a lighthouse

that’s afraid of everything

it can’t shine a light on.

Mediocrity shows you its scars.

Genius shows you the wound.

Mediocrity’s amazed

that the universe

got as far as it did on its own.

Genius walks the rest of the way alone

and doesn’t care if the path it’s on

reads like an exit or an entrance.

Mediocrity looks for acceptance.

Genius throws the audience out the window

like an old typewriter with keys missing

and all its loved ones

smiling in the front row

as if they were in on the know

and sits down by itself at the piano

and lets the silence play

whatever it wants

all night long.

Mediocrity makes a big splash

like an inert gas

in a flickering neon sign

advertising one night stands

in a cheap roadside motel.

Genius shapes space like black matter

that stays hidden

on the far side of gravity

behind the leaves

that grow on its boughs like galaxies

that wait like nests in the treetops

for the shamans babies and birds

to fill their bright vacancy

with the dark abundance

of a language older than words.

There are lyrical swords

that have mastered the art

of writing their eloquent history

in scars that pre-date cuneiform.

That’s one muse.

And when the dark mother

who gave birth

to the ten thousand things

whispered the mystery of the universe

into her own ear

she said it in stars.

That’s another.

And when you listen to the moon

as she summons her own

like lost echoes and mad shadows

to the fullness welling up inside her

she sheds her eyelids like loveletters

she’s read over and over again

out loud to the lunatics

like cracks in a dry creekbed

or a prophetic skull

waiting for rain.

She’s beauty pain and death

all rolled up into one

black rose of inspiration

she hands out

to those of us she loves

like an eclipse

without an explanation. 

Mediocrity doesn’t understand this.

Three lucidities in one black mirror

before the arising of signs

and all it’s looking for

is its likeness

in the meaning of everything.

Humans may have been created

in the image of God

but the world’s not created

in the image of humans.

It’s a lot crazier than that.

Mediocrity makes a habit of significance

to justify its eyes

to the nightwatchman in the mirrors.

Genius pulls the hat out of the rabbit

and the magician disappears.

 

PATRICK WHITE