TRYING TO EXPRESS

TRYING TO EXPRESS

Trying to express a more immediate intimacy

with the life of the mind

without attributing a form to madness

might just be another way

of looking for comic relief

from the actual facts

of the tragic folly that confronts us

like a world that won’t tolerate any mask

you want to put on it for long

to lie about the atrocity of your irrelevance

and pretend you don’t know

what you’re looking at.

I dream I suffer the same

corpuscular purpose as a paramecium.

I wake up from these desert mirages

and it’s true.

OK it’s true.

Next.

Because nothing in life is an endgame.

And despite the full stop like an empty cup

at the end of a thought

with the lifespan of a punctuation mark

my cup runneth over like the new moon

and everything is drunk on the lunacy of its light.

It’s not the content of life that matters

as much as the way space bends

to accommodate it.

It’s not the wine

it’s the emptiness of the cup

that shapes the forms of our knowing

so that they can be grasped

by our eyes and hands

as separate things in the world.

Mind is a poet a potter a painter a parent a prophet

that will not be bound by its own works

or the laws of the defenceless who expound them.

Look out into space

and the furthest you will ever see

is a face in the mirror that’s older than matter.

Space is a vehicle of transformation

that doesn’t go anywhere

because anywhere it goes

its wheels are centered

in the still points of themselves

as we are to our navels.

And all lifelines

straight or otherwise

are emanations of its radiance.

Order and logic and reason

are the dry wishbones of the fearful

looking for predictability in a world

that can’t be contained

by a unified field theory

or an elaborated straitjacket

on the fashion ramps of science.

Physics says one size fits all

but by the time the spiders

are finished weaving it

the sleeves are always too short

to keep up with a universe

that’s growing at the speed of light

and I’d rather walk naked

in the skin of my own clarity

than be clothed

in someone else’s hand-me-downs.

I’m not out hunting birds and butterflies

with a dreamcatcher.

I’m not looking for peace and healing

by abstaining from myself

like a promise I broke to my ancestors.

Everyone was born a lifeboat

in an abysmal sea of awareness

or they wouldn’t be here to know it.

So who needs to be saved?

Or is there some kind of holy war going on

between the lifeboats and the waves?

And where does Jerusalem go

to free itself of infidels

when it goes on crusade?

All waves are waterbells

that never stop tolling

and the mindstream

they’re raised upon

is in everyone

the sum of what’s holy about life.

Learn to transcend your certainties

if you want to get over your doubts.

Don’t hoard the effects of your efforts

in the name of a good cause

that’s so blinded by its own light

that it can’t see

that there’s as much randomness in the wonder

as there is in the horror.

That what’s most terrifying about life

is that it’s free

of anything you can say or feel or think about it.

That every part in every moment

is not the sum

but the consummation of the whole

that roots and flowers in everyone

as if it were a secret

that bloomed for them alone.

To know the names of things

like the names of stars and flowers

is to look at them from the outside.

Who called you Eve?

Who called you Adam?

If you know your name

you’re already in exile.

But it was not us

who were driven out of the garden.

Knowledge drives the garden out of us.

It turns our eyes around

so we can’t see Eden from the inside

where our beginnings are always now

and we are no more dispossessed

of our innocence

than the passion expressed by a flower

in a loveletter to the light

can be disenchanted

of the insight that inspired it.

What’s truly tragic about life when it seems so

is not that it’s evil

but that it’s innocent

and its innocence is older than compassion.

The moon sheds its phases.

The flower its petals.

They’re always coming and going

from the same abyss they’re heading into.

The emptiness engenders this abundance

out of its own potential for growth

and even death is not culpable.

This is space.

That is space.

But the two

can no more be separated

than a wave can be from water.

You don’t need a unified field theory

to understand unity.

You don’t need to hold a mirror up

to your face

to see your own reflection

when you can see yourself in everything.

What does space look like to space?

Mind to mind?

Light to light?

The dreamer to the dream?

What could God possibly say to herself

that she didn’t already know?

There’s nothing hidden.

There’s nothing secret.

There’s nothing that escapes detection.

There’s no simulacrum for the void

that elaborates everyone’s likeness.

There’s no dead metaphor in the word

waiting to be resurrected.

The absolutes may be in denial

about the way things seem

but even when their eyes

burn through glass like stars

lost in their own immensities

they can’t impress the darkness

with a theory of cosmic shadows.

They don’t need to look

any further into space

than the ends of their noses

to see the constellations

casting them

across the universe

like the shadows of the stars

that aren’t there anymore

trying to throw a light on black matter

by noting its absence.

Gravitational eyes devoid of light.

Black holes without keys

in the doors of perception.

Dry wishing wells on the moon

that have never plumbed the depths

of their bottomless longing

to hear something irrevocably truer

than the echoes of their own voices

coming back to them

like crows and doves to an ark.

By the time you know it

any event is over.

By the time you see the dawn

the sun has already set.

In the seed of every insight

you can read your own gravestone.

You can see there’s as much death in it

as there is life.

You can feel the spring coming on

as if you were already buried

under the savage tiger-lilies.

And you can ask

until you’re as blue in the face as a hyacinth

what it all meant

after you’re dead

out in the incredible open

that’s closed to the living

just past the end of their fingertips.

Or if it ever meant anything at all.

You can see and be it this way.

You can go on a long journey

to a prison or a shrine or a hospital

and return home

with no more insight

than you had when you left.

And still wonder if it was all worth it.

Because no experience of life

is truer than another

reality is not separated

from our awareness of it

nor subject to reform.

There is no norm

that isn’t a prevailing illusion by consensus.

But the desert isn’t looking for water

and only the one-eyed fools

mistake their eye-patchs

for an eclipse of the moon

and their own mirages

for a new way of thinking

when it’s thinking’s best virtue not to have one.

People and things are ok as they are

but they don’t realize it.

They keep trying to live up

to their own reflections.

They keep trying to sweep

the stars and the deserts

off their front stairs

looking for a stairway to heaven

where the dust of the world

can’t find a place to rest.

But time is a pulse of the heart

not the heavy pendulum

of a grandfather clock

and as Pablo Neruda once wisely said

the poetry is under your fingernails

and I would less wisely add

as is heaven.

No one’s on the wrong path

once they open both their eyes

to what’s underfoot

whether you’re walking

on water stars or fireflies

or riding dolphins.

Whether your road

is a shoelace or smoke

or the lifeline of an umbilical cord

measured in wavelengths and lightyears

or your journey’s still

an astronaut in the womb.

Mirrors holding mirrors up

to judgement for their spots.

Narcissus doesn’t like what he’s looking at.

So what?

The roads don’t suddenly

turn back on themselves

because they lack floors

and a place of their own.

Heaven uses the same return address as hell.

But when death comes knocking in Aleppo

and you’re out walking your own mile

in your own shoes

to nowhere in particular

free of arrivals and departures

no one’s ever home

and every threshold you cross

is not hindered by an exit or an entrance.

Some walk.

Some run.

Some swim.

Some fly.

Some crawl.

Some ride.

Some dance.

And some sit still by the window

growing younger by the moment

the longer they look into the distance.

PATRICK WHITE

IF I WERE TO GIVE YOU A BLACK SHAWL OF WOVEN RIVERS

IF I WERE TO GIVE YOU A BLACK SHAWL OF WOVEN RIVERS

If I were to give you a black lace shawl of woven rivers

would you wear it over the moonlit hills

of your bare shoulders like a spell I cast

to keep you as warm as a firefly on a cold night?

Or would you mistake it for a bird net or a spider web

or think I’m fishing in the depths for the black pearl

of a new moon to hold in an old moon’s arms?

Or milk your last crescent as an antidote to your charms?

If I were to show you a back road out of hell

as Orpheus did Eurydice, would you look back again

at the long path that came to this and think

you’d rather drink black cool aid in Jonestown

than follow a goated footed sherpa up

into the mountains of the moon that cast their spells

like the shadows of sundials in a flowerless garden?

Would the stars that are flowing between us

suddenly harden into diamonds, would an ice-age

come of a spring thaw, or would you neglect it all

like global warming, or just another butterfly

in the mouth of a dragon that doesn’t know when

to keep his shut. Should Merlin fall on the sword

he embedded in rock like iron ore when iron

was still a magical metal, or should he fire up the forge

recast his sword, and crown himself the king of metallurgy?

I’m not rich, but if I were to stand on a streetcorner for you

and play the songs I wrote for you the night before

on a blue guitar I managed to save from the housefire

of a weeping violin that couldn’t put it out for love or money,

would you still love me for who I am and was,

or look for a just cause to hand me a suitcase full of ashes

and show me the door like a snowflake

to the furnace of your Fukushima heart

like a crumpled loveletter you read like junkmail

meant to suck you in to a romantic scam for life

without any heavy water to speak of to cool your eyes?

Or would you let me risk my luck up against yours

between the wishbone of your thighs and give me a break?

Tine the tongue of the snake like a tuning fork

that can taste the lightning to come in every chimney spark?

Or if I were to lose, still cherish me for my own sake,

and give me a rain cheque until my lifeboat comes in

like providence on the last high tide of the moon

to sail the skull and crossbones among the angel fleets

like a cheap thrill off the coasts of Atlantis?

Or would you treat me as just another seagull

looking for scraps in the waning wake of moonset

unweaving by night what it wove by day

like Penelope among a hovering flock of unwanted suitors?

I could teach you how to fletch the arrows of love

like hawks that never missed their targets,

or the flightfeathers of skylarks and mourning doves

should you prefer them to the quills of the peacocks

that never fly any higher than the lowest rung of the tree,

a hundred eyes open like hand mirrors on a vanity

but none that can see you as I can like an ageing man

who can find nothing to compare you to yesterday

but a few rogue stars that whispered between the lines

of their unnamed constellations, things that I want

to say to you today out loud as if I had wings

on my heels and a secret crane-bag around my my neck

with an hermetic alphabet that could talk

to your body in tongues like a morning snail

riding its own smear of love like a skyful of mirrors

flowing like unholy rivers through a sacred garden of starmud.

PATRICK WHITE

NO RAY OF THE STAR

NO RAY OF THE STAR

No ray of the star in the lead,

none following, no one vector of light,

the compass needle for all the rest.

Eye to eye, side by side,

like the spikes of an onion gone to seed,

companionship and parity,

even after billions of light years,

every one’s still shining among their peers.

Even your best efforts

to make it all into one when it already is,

are in musical harmony

like dissonance in jazz

with every wavelength of heart and mind

in a great creative collaboration

with every thread on the loom of a flying carpet

as big as the universe, growing

into the vast expanse of the chaos

it’s spinning itself out of like the three fates,

the daughters of night with their thread and shears

severing the lifelines of passion birth and death.

Let them. Because there’s a little green thread of love

coiling around your spinal column like serpent fire

that can’t be cut by scissors or tears,

a dragon of dna with rainbow chromosomes

riding the stairwells and thermals of its own flames

like a wild grape vine, or trout lilies

down by the night creek

holding up their blossoms

like masterpieces to the stars

apprenticed to their shining

like one genius to another

revealing what can be done with light

when everyone’s working in the same medium.

Every star, a kiss on the eyelids

of a wildflower in a far field

that’s gone back to seed for a while,

every rose and mushroom alike.

Every ray of light, a mystic spear

through the heart of a disbelieving telescope

that’s just had a major revelation

not only about the true nature

of the radiance within

but the ore of the darkness

that includes it like a diamond close to its heart.

Every lucid needle in the haystack,

in the pin cushion of every star,

laying out the pattern of a constellation

like a star map with a ray of light in its teeth,

and every angel that dances thereon,

and every angel that keeps its place under a stone

as a junkie London poet once wrote,

and every demon of a black dwarf

that gave its all and everything up

until there was nothing left but a black hole

or a massive cosmic match head that’s burnt out

like the ashen bud of a heretic that bloomed in fire

like the seeds under the eyelids

of the pine-cone of a Zen pagoda,

and returned the universe to the darkness it came from

like a child it discovered wandering

too far from home without a threshold of its own,

is patching the wounds of the sacred clowns

with the whole cloth of the rags they’re standing in

with roses and rainbows at midnight

and big ripe tears in a windfall of pears

that keep falling to their destiny

without realizing they’re plunging toward paradise

every time they lose their grip on things.

In my unified field theory,

whether you call it fana, nirvana, tauhid,

the godhead, the plenum void, the blaze,

the rapture, dropping off body and mind

once the Japanese plum blossoms

have turned into fruit and realized

no sweetness in the apple bloom

no ripeness in the apple, God,

Brahma on his lotus, Muhammad on Buraq,

Jesus on the cross, Moses on the mountain,

or you’ve just had a serious falling out with your lover,

in a world so boundlessly unified

we have to resort to stars for boundary stones

like illusory barriers between too much and too little,

where the sweet water meets the salt;

in my intimately impersonal skew

of the crazy wisdom of what’s happening here,

the most accurate thing

you can whisper like a poem

into your neighbour’s or lover’s ear,

is not two, not two, not two, like the vital pulse

of a musical cult of oxymorons

at a gathering of opposites in the wilderness,

everything clings to one another inseparably

like the primordial atom to its table of contents,

like a fish to water, a bird to air,

a star to the darkness, the heart and the mind

to every thought and emotion

of the space-time continuum it works in,

or insight into the mystery that inspires it

to go looking for more grails

than there are ailing kingdoms

to hold them up to their lips

like rain on ripe blackberries

or the full moons of magic mushrooms

because every drop of rain’s a grail in itself.

For every star, an imaginary number

of lifemasks like metaphors

as many as there are flowers

and children of the earth to wear them

as if dressing up for life were the embodiment

of how awareness made its first appearance

like a hidden secret that wished to be known

through an infinite number

of ongoing myriad things all at once forever.

Ergo: we’re all in the same lifeboat together

looking for one and the same threshold

in our homelessness like rogue planets

dancing around one another as if each

were in reach of the sun of the other,

sister, brother, and lover, mother and father,

bonded by the light and life

we’ve all been looking for long before

we were born to shine upon one another like this

as if there were no difference

between the crests and valleys

of one wave and another,

our fullness and our emptiness

on the great night sea of the abyss

that is always as pregnant with us

as it is with the membranous wombs of the multiverse

whenever we kiss in deep hyperspace

and a whole new world gets off on us.

In this realm everyone receives one another

like a gift they weren’t expecting

and are never sure they deserve,

down to the last atom of the drunk in the doorway,

the exile in the embassy yard

looking for sanctuary in his own country

by asking you to let him in

like the angel of immigrants in disguise,

like a teen age girl on the sidewalk,

crying like a star-crossed chandelier of rain

shattered like a crystal slipper at her feet

into the plinths and shards of a constellation

you can only see on the dark side of the mirror

like the secret reflection of who she is

inside the locket she hangs around her heart

like the moondog of an innocent suicide

no one would have ever guessed she had in her

like a conversation that never took place, face to face,

heart to heart, when timing was as important as content.

If you hold up a mirror to your own lifemask,

a puddle where the starmud’s settled down

like the cornerstone of the moon in a tent

that’s comes to flower in the backyard

of a house of the zodiac, you can see in your own face

the faces of everyone who’s ever been, or is, and will be,

you will see in the single eye of a seed

how many Japanese plum blossoms had to be

scattered down the street like a Milky Way of the ancestors

you’re descended from, to implant their vision

of light and love and life in you. And how

transience learned from the wind

how to let go and give it all away

like the passage of birds and the winged samara

of maples across the full moon, all the fruits

and flowers, stars and seeds of a generous autumn

shaken like the apple orchards of the Hesperides into your lap.

And to begrudge one atom

of this inexhaustible plenty to anyone

is to starve to death in your own garden

is to deny your own children bread

you didn’t break with them like a harvest of light

so their darkness wouldn’t hunger

for stars the rest of their lives.

Is to live in the shining

and grow possessive of shadows.

Is to break off a love affair with the waters of life.

Is to never feel your eyes ripen from

something green and bitter

into a mirage of wine in the desert

that drinks time spiced with stars

from an hourglass of a blissful delirium

where even the vipers have learned to dance in the sand

among the bones of skeletal keyboards.

Anyway, you get the point, and once

you’ve got the point, you’ve got the wavelength by the tail

and you’re centered everywhere in a boundless universe

and the circle is as complete as a drop of rain,

or the growth rings of a tree

making ripples in the heartwood of spring

to give the birds and the stars and the trees

something to sing about they weren’t expecting.

That no sum of zeroes ever added up to nothing

as if something were missing from the very start

like blackholes that don’t write their names

on the galaxies they make out of their emptiness.

Out of nothing, one, and in that one

that includes everybody you can see

how the zeroes got carried away by the billions

into an infinite elaboration of their radiant vision

of a universe of overlapping circles making waves

and all it takes is one insight

into the creativity of compassion

that steals the breath of the stars away in amazement

that one ray of light from the least expected quarter

when you least expect it is more than enough

to touch your heart with a feather of love

fallen from a passing nightbird above

that has been calling to you all night in the darkness

to see how enlightened everything is as it is

when you open up the black holes

in the wild irises of your eyes to it.

PATRICK WHITE

MUSING IN THE AFTERMATH

MUSING IN THE AFTERMATH

Everything sings, the shadows of the winter branches against the streetlamp

laced on the windowpane ribboned by dirt, back doors and rooftops

and yet I am enveloped in this silence without wings, this voice

that valleys the universe like a drop of water down the spine of a leaf

to the root of no flower, no heart, no simple mystery of the night

maturing into stars. I’m in a room with books, paintings, lamps,

plants, computers, easels and cats. Things are neither right nor wrong

though I flatter myself that I have grown from mistake to mistake,

defeat to defeat and cloak the sum of all my failures

in the unconvincing authority of experience.

It’s rude to take your masks off in the light.

I try to see myself in the darkness like a star

with too much to say that loves to give its hiding place away. Forgive

this indiscretion of my solitude, but my name has obligations

and there’s nothing in the house to eat but swans.

Soon enough there’ll be a term to all these spectral visions

that add their shadows to the lead migrations of my thought

and traverse the motionless deserts of the skull-faced moon.

And what can I say to the pilgrims who come to visit my heart,

all these lean feelings without deceit or art

who crowd around the miracle like damaged mystics and moths

hoping their agony will be immolated in the serene ferocity of the void?

Space is only the rough draft of my emptiness

and ghosts confer in the wings like uninspired actors 

or lie detectors trying to interpret the crimes of my last passion play. 

Before I was born to cross the sky in a blue coffin with a black rose

among all these islands of light, I was the ashes of a bird

in the cold furnace of my life, a jest of the indifferent wind

that toys with the lamp and candle of my seeing.

Now, in every word, among a hundred million burning stars,

it’s enough to watch a vagrant firefly, a constellation of one

blind the universe in a single flash with marvel

as I slide down the helical bannisters of every descending starwell

toward the dark by which the dark is known.

Together with everyone I heed the mystery alone

and I don’t know how I got this way

or if I’m a shadow or a wing, the gesture of anything,

but when the moon is in my window, the night arrayed,

musing in the aftermath of life’s homely escapade,

a little afraid, I feel someone dying, and I sing.

PATRICK WHITE

IT’S NOT ENOUGH

It’s not enough to hinge a new door to your heart

when the house is built on flowerless quicksand

and the chimneys have acquired a taste for books;

poems are the birthmarks of stairwells climbing themselves,

of hawks and serpents boring into the corks of wine

to get at the heart, the passions, the dreams, the rage

of the vine that set out like a road that got carried away

and fell in love with the intimate strangers who took it home

and danced all night among the swords as if they were thresholds.

Born in the shadows of unbearable bells, early I found

they were bound to the cord of my spine, like the moon

among the kelp that oils its tides with the black sperms of creation,

and I learned to pull on their iron parachutes to ease

my harsh, hot descents into wingless, mute oblivions;

I discovered there was a voice beyond mine

that could gather and disperse, celebrate and divine

the secret weddings and deaths of the bridal ghosts that came

like castaway bouquets to the refugee altars of their torn veils.

And there’s an indelible secret as old as the eyes of the wind

that can whisper sand into pyramids, that won’t receive

the vows of the petty and clever who traffic in the shadows

of the great, wild dead who wore their battered crowns like fire.

Let them crib their poems on the back of another man’s eyelids,

real constellations don’t shine like this and the wells are mute

whose waters taste of fireflies; and there isn’t a river on the moon

that knows how to plead with the sea for a widow that mourns,

that knows whose prodigy of blood unravels on autumn’s horns,

or how the waterlily in the mouth of the dragon

is more dangerous than a shrine full of blind snakes.

Behind every name, behind every door with a brass threshold

is a man who was forgotten by his own violated treaties

with the indentured mirrors he consulted to cheat the lakes,

who comes up over his horizons like the solemnities of the moon,

looking for the pillar of his lost reflection in chunks of coal,

in the underfed crematoria of his sacrificial backyard fire-pits

in the lifelines of the empty hands he misread like maps of smoke.

Poetry isn’t an orphanage or asylum for the disenchanted,

though there is a deranged abyss under its relentless solitude;

not a showcase Colosseum for famished lions at a petting zoo,

though mauled minds and bodies litter the unwitnessed field;

there are no paths through its unanswerable distances

strewn with petals or thorns, no bridges or waystations,

no branches of hospitable trees to perch in for the night,

no dawns that can erase what’s been written on your forehead,

nothing that can blind you to what you were born to see,

no rain that can douse the squandered fire of the poppy,

though the messenger is smashed like a bottle between

the tide and the rock; the star, the candle, the nightflower

snuffed by the morning, the last breath of the deathless moon.

And you must die enough to not be there

when the world picks up a pen like an axis

to spin in the direction of its wounded inclinations,

you must not walk into the house wearing a face,

your breath on the glacial windows of the furious stars

full of secret fingerprints, love-notes, names,

you must be more conversant than a ghost on a bridge

or a rose, or an empty mailbox, or a road that followed you

to where the river turns, with shapeshifting,

with pearling a body around a syllable of sand,

with showing a galaxy its shadow in eyelids and eclipses,

with standing like a scarecrow in the cornfield

that shucked the cob of a smile to batter you with birds,

with lying beside the dead like a lantern in a morgue

as if your blood crossed the threshold for them,

with waiting in the earth a long time, a root

that conceals orchards in the furrows of its dirty hands,

a buried boat that unfurls the blossoms of its sails,

the starcharts of the blind moles that shine underground,

like a voyage in search of the rudder of your tongue

to pilot it safely out of the ports of the moon,

a flame, a breath, a feather you’ve cradled for years,

the small measures of belief in an oceanic grave

that enrobes the flowing in the wake of severed waves.

Be stone, or be space; the emptiness is the same,

silver ore, or the motherlode of a black hole,

let your heart pan the long rivers of the night

for what the stars value, jewels of life in the light

that can be grown like a menagerie of blood and tears,

the eyes of the blackberries, eyes of the radiant bee

on the flutes of the wind that plays for a handful of seeds.

PATRICK WHITE

PRIMA NOCTIS

PRIMA NOCTIS

Of human misery what’s left to tell

the single bead of the moon

that makes a lonely rosary of revolutions,

one face always turned away

as if it refused to look upon

its own imploring features

in the brutal, breathless, garish light of day,

or those of the earth

reviewed in the turning below?

I am nothing, a man, a microbe on a skull

picked clean by immaculate cannibals

whose hands are greased with brains,

my much vaunted, cultivated consciousness

and sterling will, free, or spontaneously

predetermined, the leaf of an afterthought

enhancing my passion for light

and periodic sentences.

Look where you will

and tell me this is evolution; tell me

this is that continuum of used mutations

that bricked the river clay of ancient Sumer

into these ascending asylums of the absurd

to burn our children in the fires of the stars

as surely as Carthage ate hers,

poor kids first, then the rich, as always,

civilization nothing but musical chairs

in the food chain, a game

of I eat you; now you eat me, who

shall be the grass, and who, the proudest of cows,

the grazer. And the grass may turn into the grazer

and the grazer into grass in transformative cycles

that ripple out wonderfully like rain

to rationalize this caste of food and feeder

and make it holy, harmonious,

and scientifically insane enough

to appeal to the average reader,

the red letter ‘A’ at the top of every genetic cliche

that’s still convinced of angels in the abattoir,

growth on this planet

nothing but the pace of murder, government

a blood-bank run by vampires intent

on the deregulation

and sanctification of their fangs, the sanguine order,

the cherished symmetries of our bacterial histories

nothing but the victory bells

calibrating the advance of slaughter. And paintings

of the gouty apes and their bedizened concubines,

and poems that only the affluent can write,

and all the cathedrals, mausoleums, and pillars that enhance

the hills of blood-soaked soil we build on,

all the refinements of culture, all

the opiates of erudition, the ineffectually coherent overviews

of the chaos of bones we throw before us

like men and women and children

to allay the superstitions of the future

that demands of us now nothing less

than the last born of our own unrequited extinction,

will not do to decorate the birthday jest

and excuse with elaborate rococo icing

nuclear candles all over the blood-cake of the planet.

If liberty means I have the right to own the rain

of another country; if health and happiness depend

upon designer genocides that race

the minds and hearts of the heartless, mindless mob

with toxic logos and lethal codicils, if wisdom and art

are only the crusted, rotten, riddled pylons

on a wharf of indulgent departures

in a sea of blood and fury, the idiotic squall

of the ship’s horn as it pilots out of harbor,

the advance defection of hurricane roses

believing the false hilarity of a doomed love cruise

and there is no lifeboat in the bruise of their beauty,

then we’re only licking the eloquence out of our own wombs

and mouthing platitudes like cleavers in a butcher-shop,

masters of dismemberment;

we’re just another evil dream that no one will remember.

And no one will recall what a morning it was once

just to wake up; and all that we have cherished

will be desecrated in a conflagration of black fire

because twenty-five million children die of starvation a year

and the fact is the small fret of an obscure poem

that will turn and destroy you

in a word from the eyes of a disgusted messiah.

If the pursuit of knowledge is a regression backwards

through the hallowed slimes of evolution,

and flesh and blood and bone, the jellies of our eyes,

are now more alien than the foundation stones

of the pyramidal corporations erected by slavers and thieves

to own every square inch of the planet’s afterlife,

inflated market shares in the global necropolis

that grows in the grave like fingernails and hair, then

how can we not be refuted by our own prescience

and perish in the cyanotic blue moonrise

of our own catastrophe coming true

when we saw, we knew, we ignored

the glacial cracks in our spacious palace of mirrors

and the rips in the knees of our emaciate atmospheres

and went on chancing the planet like a week-end casino?

We’re just another inept species under the bell-jar

of the writing on the wall that no one remembers how to read

as we exterminate ourselves in radioactive ferocities of greed,

dead as yesterday’s headline in the instant that we breed.

There are nations on their knees being whipped to death

by their own umbilical cords

in the evangelic hands of missionary markets

and there are nations that vie for the lion’s place

in the imperial trend of the stable atrocities

that guarantee that children will bleed

to cleanse the wound and fatten the gland of a dividend.

The corporate wasp lays its egg on the forehead

of the living host and butterflies

are cancelled like bad cheques,

nations are gutted from the inside out,

and the experts defend the economic dialectics

of flexing their hex of hysterical democracy

over the bent necks of experimental derelicts

labouring in a labyrinth of lab rats and executive acts.

Among the swans and soirees of the prosperous assassins

the insiders trade in subtle abortions

and panicked climacterics of erotic stock

that convulse the planet with toxic shock

as their dicks erect with capital and war

violate the wind, the water, the oil, the ore

until the rapacity of their lust is satiate with scandal

and peace is mentioned, justice, human dignity

and they pull out in a hurry, limp with virtue,

and from the pulpits of the puppet press

dry clean the torn dress, the stained flag,

with the bleaches and fabric softeners

of their laundered confessions and laissez-faire digressions

on market pressures and open trade relations

with the third-world brides of the first night

that are torn from their husband’s arms

and subject to palatial abominations,

exploited like a resource, their wombs battered into sterility,

must learn to comply with capital’s amorous charms

among the ruined nuns and nations

labouring under the weight of corporate virility,

voyeuristic eunuchs in the fiscal shadows,

and skeletal children thinner than keys,

still stunted in the filthy chimneys

of the captains of commerce, the Molochs of money

quoting chapter and verse of their logo genetics

to feed another generation to their corporate creed,

a labour camp for orphaned amputees,

severities of people on their knees,

cut like a budget.

PATRICK WHITE