CINDER IN THE SUN'S EYE

CINDER IN THE SUN’S EYE

Cinder in the sun’s eye, there’s fire in your tears.

You plunge into the light like a moth on a mission

and it’s the sun that disappears to shine at midnight

in the black mirrors of your eyes. Dark light, intense,

starling, charred swan, you know as well as I do,

the occult approach to the optimism of an eclipse

is to act radically in the name of things you can

only unattainably conceive of. Love on your wrist

like a hawk whose wing you healed, dwelling

in your homelessness without a fear of eviction.

No truth in the mouth of the snake that’s pulled

the fangs of its conviction out of the sky

like crescent moons, pins from the eye

of a voodoo doll you’ve nursed for light years

on the nightshift of a morgue that’s aroused by death.

Milk of your left breast kills. The other practices compassion.

Whole snakepits in the shrines of the wavelengths

mourning the death of Medusa, as if snakes too

had something to mourn that makes them shine within you.

Ten thousand photos from an orbiting satellite

with X ray vision and a spectrographic trajectory

couldn’t improve upon the license of your beauty

like a black pearl at the magmatic core of planet

trying to make herself as habitable as she can to visitors.

And for those who aren’t used to your kind of light,

you hand out sun-visors and starmaps

and black candles to show them the way home

through the same old doorway they came in by.

You’re an ambassadorial firefly from the third eye

of dark matter where the roots of the light are embedded

and you’ve got a message for the blossom

that looks like a love letter. The moon

budding on a dead branch like a crack in the door

you left ajar like an orchard in waiting on a cold spring night.

And who but you could stand eye to eye with the bravery

you practise like a World War II canary

in an underground armaments factory that isn’t bomb proof?

There’s nothing yellow about the skin of your ammunition.

You confront cosmic dangers in the intimate details.

You ignite and defuse the supernovas and black holes

that endanger the lives of those who follow you like a cult

and though you like their company, you’d much rather be

maculately alone with someone who can see for themselves

that those who were driven out, exiled

into the emptiness of the unknown extremes of the mind

often return with their hands full of the strangest gifts

that time and distance have ever offered anyone

to prove how off course the shore-huggers are

in assessing the course of a life as far out

and comprehensive as the sea. Deeper than stars.

Emotionally more expansive than the immensity

of any shining that can be palmed off cheaply

in the pawn shops of the retinal tidal pools clutching

to the relics and icons of disembodied crab claws.

You don’t live like the collateral damage of the sun

and the sea. You don’t ask amputees to show you

a way out of the labyrinth by the light of spent candles.

Cinder in the sun’s eye, there’s fire in your tears.

A luminosity that flows unceasingly

from the watersheds of broken mirrors.

You just have to cry. And dragons as immutable

as diamond cutters take up flower arranging

in a Zen teahouse enlightened by the rain.

PATRICK WHITE

DON'T COVER YOUR EYES

DON’T COVER YOUR EYES

Don’t cover your eyes when the stars begin to fall; don’t

orphan your fire in a well. Your heart is not a museum of roses,

your love not a misdirected airdrop over a refugee camp.

Friend of these sidereal affinities we spread like table-cloths across space,

friend of these lonely silos in my eyes and this blood that breaks like bread,

still, you are the flower in the vase, impassioned, an urgent poppy.

All the blind librarians of the morning star agree

you are not who you say you are

when you show the shadows of authority your passport rainbow.

Sometimes the tongue of a forsaken seer dances like a drunk at a funeral

down the liberated allies of a sleeping ghetto

while the moon watches like a cat on a windowsill

high overhead. Shy bird feathered by your sudden flaring, your heart,

young and quick, darts easily from branch to branch

barely a presence behind the green jubilation

of a million silver leaves trembling with rain on the reborn tree.

Before the bird sings, we hear it. Before the star shines,

the night is fully enlightened. And home is always a bridge

where we wait to be rescued from hurling ourselves off

into our own desperate reflections. Let the fall save you.

You are the priestess in the shrine of mysterious apples,

sybil and empress of opulent oranges. No matter how many alphabets

enshroud the fairies in the legendary brilliance of ancient skies

and over the telephone cancel the sacred islands in their eyes,

your blood will bind them to this vital afterlife of now like fish

swimming through the flawed water palace

of a drowned engine. You can bet your lies on it;

your sorrows are not the face-paint of weeping clowns,

nor your natural humanity a moat around a zoo for dwindling dragons.

When you sprawl like a wave of wine across the living room floor,

unspooling the honey and gold of your body’s flower-mine,

I see orchards in your guitar, wheat fire,

the landscape of a small, borderless country

trying to decide which of all its trees should form a government.

Compassionate zero, water your only foundation stone,

you string a harp between your fangs

between the unblooded crescents of the moon

and sink your music deep into the heart of your astounded prey.

Little killer, don’t you know, little killer,

let me tell you,

the saints are crueler than the sinners, the virgins

cheaper than the whores, and reason in its nest of crows

a bird that never soars. Through dangerous doorways, under

lethal skies, the ghost dance of the blind tiger, the white faun

while the widows of light pawn their eyeless rings

in the brutal crucibles of dawn. You want some advice?

Only the great fools who plead for nothing

know all the words to the song.

PATRICK WHITE

YOU DON'T COME

YOU DON’T COME

You don’t come. Your absence is a guillotine. My heart

plummets from the altitude it risked in looking forward

to a day with you outside of time and circumstance, jumps

from the edge of paradise, the flat earth, the back

of a winged horse. You don’t come and such

is the nature of love

I go out of the plane not knowing

if I’ve got a parachute on and my heart

pulls the rip cord to see if there’s any salvation in the fall,

any flowers for me in the bag, morning glory

or dandelion seed, or this is just another

mode of acceleration to death. You don’t come

and my heart candles without a reserve,

I haven’t packed a spare dawn

and though I will make every effort to understand

there’s a grave waiting down below like an open mouth

and the void is laughing at the persistent folly

of my believing you would come,

and my fear of not being worthy of love anymore

sends my mendicant self-image out

wandering over thirteenth century Europe like some flagellant

on a pilgrimage of flogging, ribbons of blood running down my back

from salted wounds, and though I know

the expectation and the disappointment are both delusions,

birdshit on the claws of a sphinx, and I will try to be

intelligent and wise about the whole thing,

tugging my heart out like a garbage-scow into deep space

where it will be laced with explosives and scuttled once again,

and I will be awarded another paradoxical brownie-badge

by another scout-master Tibetan rinpoche

for knowing how to survive alone in this empty wilderness,

a tiger of will, a Viking of resolve,

an aging clown without children or laughter, a jester-king

officiating from the throneless butt of his own joke,

a poet with nothing to praise, a painter

with cataracts in the eye and flowers in the sky, I

know there is nothing I can tell myself, no spiritual weed

I can poultice over the vacancy that goes on forever

to draw out the infection from my heart, the gangrene

from the broken pillar of the foolish temple I erected

to serve the goddess in any of her lunar phases,

and though I struggle like a diminished thing to accept my dejection,

to imbibe the toxins from the left tit of the Medusa

while trying not to turn into stone, while trying

not to avert my eyes from this crone-form of the moon, let

Kali drink my blood, in the name of insight, clarity and courage,

good wolf, I know this, too, is delusion, another

projected holograph from the third eye of the pineal gland,

and kick the chair from under

the useless fruit of my head in a noose. Back to earth

without a heat shield. Impact. You don’t come

and your absence is filling up with people I like as far as I know

but don’t want to see, people who walk into

the sad forests of my solitudinous melancholy with chain-saws

for conversation, stupid lost bored people who just can’t help it,

looking for cigarettes and companionship in the life-boat,

the leper-colony, stars on the Titanic, and I am compelled up

from the depths of my cosmic despair like a white whale in a holding pen

to jump for the tourists, make a big splash, make

anything happen to amuse them, and I try, I honestly try, regretting

even the shabby sincerity of my own incapacitated efforts to love them

by pulling something out of the guts

of my own anonymous dismemberment, a hand or an eye or a smile,

and it all feels like the work of a tired ox grinding social corn

on the zodiacal millstone of its own heart

but everyone leaves like a gray day anyway, the sun eclipsed

and I am returned to myself like polluted water

running like a desert flashflood through the dry creekbed

of your undeniable absence. You don’t come. You have forgotten me

as you said you wouldn’t and all the promises

of intimacy and vivid affection

are unleashed like a plague of locusts on the moon

to devour the open-faced swordless clocks of the flowers

I planted there for you to know eternity in the hour.

I am eaten alive by a million mouths

and even yesterday’s demons banished from the feast

are called back from lean exile

to this jubilant feeding-frenzy that consumes without mercy.

You don’t come. And I don’t blame you. I understand

the flux of time and circumstance, I understand

how a man goes to bed at night thinking

he’ll be drinking wine in the morning

and winds up being offered vinegar on a cross,

I understand that there are events that appear like sharks

in this water droplet of a world, that there are crossroads

that baffle the journey with traffic cops

and starless unknowns, with roadkill and dangerous vagrants,

that there are off road shortcuts across the far fields

that seem to take forever to return us to where we began. Alive

fifty-four years, I understand what it is to walk this road of ghosts, a refugee,

carrying your own body to a shower in a concentration camp,

to mistake the apocalypse of a nuclear explosion

for the advent of dawn, to mistake the knot in a river of wood

for a ship on the horizon, an island in the stream. Castaway again

on the cold rocks of some extraterrestrial shore

to follow my own footprints back to me, every life form on the planet,

including myself, a fossil of nirvanic spontaneity,

some indecipherable glyph broken off

the loaf of some lost continent like a crumb of stale bread, a bone-fragment,

a dead civilization, to feed the curiosity of time-travellers

who fix like junkies on the mystery of their passage

through empty alien rooms, though I burn like a library of reasons,

and mock my own scholarship, mustering arguments against myself

to excuse your absence and justify another fleet of coffins

sailing to the rescue, I do understand. You do not come. This negligence

is unintentional. You are young, free, a gust of wind and a leaf

that flares up in a back-alley throwing gold-dust in your eyes,

fire-fly north that can’t be constellated, a dolphin off the bough,

and I am no fisherman with a net, no obvious lures,

who’s trying to draw you up on deck out of your element,

but a captain going down with the ship, his hands at the wheel out of habit.

You have not come and I am a thousand years older and more correct

than I was on this delirious bird-mad morning,

lyrically awaiting you, than I am now looking upon all these sad eggs

smashed like a junkyard of embryo suns and broken crowns

at the foot of a nest in the bent axle of the cosmic tree

where I hang like the pagan god, Wodin, a sacrifice unto myself,

one pathos to another, inaudibly whispering last words

into the ineffable silence of a non-existent ear.

You have not come and all your reasons are valid. Brutally,

I understand the firewalk of this excruciation on crutches,

limping over hot coals to transcend myself for clarity’s sake,

for poetry’s sake, your sake, my sake, love’s sake, the seeing’s sake,

I have worn out the road and the bridges of my feet

with my walking across the rivers of hell to understand:

I am aging and the ignorant insane children of this black spring,

brought up on logos and T.V. only come to look through

the rubble of Tintagel for the lost jewels of Merlin,

for any heart-stone they could pull the sword out of

to establish their own thrones once again

in the fields of glory beyond the round table of the calendar.

I have drunk from the cup and passed it on and all the shining skies

that I have ever walked under, all the legends of my stars,

my former radiance, in their eyes, are cemeteries of dead stars,

black dwarfs and the holes of exhausted graves in space, the blue-white

of their ingathered light that once could stir a planet into life,

now the braille of an effaced epitaph runed on a poet’s tomb.

And it’s not as if they don’t come bearing gifts when they do come,

flowers and compliments to the green patina on my erudition,

small obeisances at graveside, gratitude

for my gray-haired kindness, token offerings to the dead,

to the prophetic skull of one of their ancestors

consulted like the weather or Moses

on the future of the promised land that I’m forbidden to enter. No blame

in their approach to the disembodied, no fault

on either side. I understand. You do not come. No word

to allay the silence, no sword to fall upon in the stoic shadows

of your portentous eclipse, no way to scry, haruspicate, divine

the meaning of the darkness that overtakes me

like Herculaneum under the canning-jar ash of a volcanic heart

putting up preserves. My dick falls off at forty. At thirty

the colour runs from my hair like a sunset. At fifty

I’m a desert in an hourglass. Fifty-four and my blood chips off

like flakes of paint from a dry rose. Two thousand a.d.,

at the turn of the millennium, my eyes turn into clouds,

my tongue, the spent autumn of a leaf on the wind. By forty-nine

all that I remember is on display in a museum, my eviscerated heart

sinks through a convenient tar-pit and my brain, cracked mud,

orders a modest sarcophagus and rents a small room under an affordable pyramid

close to the valley of the kings. Today

I shed a few tears tinged with acid that die

like rain looking for roots on rock and bury my riddle of bones and vertebrae

under the snuffed fire-pit of a cave floor

for an archaeologist not yet born to guess at what I was.

You do not come. I understand. Tired of scratching at my coffin lid,

I must get out, I go to the Perth Restaurant and call to see

if you need a ride even though the wheel

is ten thousand years in the future, fire hasn’t been discovered yet

and I’m back in the Jurassic, a tiny mammal, trying not

to be stepped on by a stampede of doomed dinosaurs.

Wrong number. Wrong life. You do not come. I understand,

the flag of my heart at half-mast on the pole of my spine,

and no one but strangers and hired mourners,

mirages and self-inflicted nightmares

to carry me out of my hapless resignation into a waiting hearse.

PATRICK WHITE

NO SHELTER FOR THE HEART

NO SHELTER FOR THE HEART

No shelter for the heart, the wind

is a wound of torn birds.

Too long in the dark

the star blooms without eyes.

I break a vow of silence with my solitude

and poems materialize

like lifeboats on the moon

in a sea of shadows.

I light my last candle

and the darkness in the room

holds a black mass for what I’ve lost.

Sensitive as a window

the sky changes like a mood ring

and my muse is an albino chameleon in eclipse.

I keep an abacus of skulls

to remind me what year it is

but the hours go by

like pilgrims to their death

and I can’t relate to this eternal view of things.

The ghosts are used to me by now.

I keep the spiderwebs at bay in the corners.

I teach those who died young the names of the stars.

I remain undiverted by death

as the lesser of two differences.

And what do I know of love

I wish I didn’t when the longing returns

to come down like a hard rock from the mountain

into the valley like a rogue foundation stone?

My memories are all the first drafts

of lives I’ve scrapped like bad addictions.

I made a bad play

out of my encyclopedic sorrows

and closed it on opening night as a farce

and everyone on stage applauded for an encore.

Leave a gate open and I’ll walk through it.

Otherwise I’m the stranger at the fence.

I’m passing by. I’m where the road

runs out into the wilderness

and I won’t stop until I’m irrevocably lost.

I’ve decultified myself from my identity.

Even my own mind doesn’t recognize me.

But I’m one of the sacred clowns of words.

I jest with the sublimities of the absurd

to outwit the pain of going mad without a loss of face

or losing my voice to the echo of a death mask.

I sit in the dark like a fire that’s tired of dancing.

I’ve forsaken mystics to hang on to my senses

and I can see colours through my fingertips

that only the boney keyboards of the blind can imagine.

I’m a high-browed home-spun lunatic in a looping universe.

Profound as play, I hone my hunting skills

by painting magical trances on my skull wall

where the slayers lie among the slain

as if an explanation belittled the mystery

of lovers flint knapping the moon into spearheads

to sanctify the rose of blood they both live by.

What’s madness but a diversified neglect of sanity

in the name of counter-intuitive inanities

that break open like Zen fortune-cookies sometimes

or the koans of cosmic eggs giddy with the bliss

of kensha, satori, enlightenment, moksa, the blaze,

for turning your mind over at last like a white stone

to see what lived under it, with lives of their own.

Who says you can take your freedom too far

for the chains to reach? I’ve dragged the whole prison

along with me at times when I had to,

happy to die like an alarm of futile compassion

in an air raid of pre-emptive meteor strikes

trying to chip a diamond in the rough away

from its own image of shining. I was

choosey at the beginning of my entrance,

but the exit’s one size fits all like your next of kin.

I like being astronomical about my intimacy

with the women who cherish the boyish charms

of my effortless buoyancy in avoiding black holes

by never sinking into them like a cue ball,

though there’s no need to mention this

like an old planetismal theory I abandoned

for the more random action of aberrant orbits.

Not very acquisitive, I haven’t accumulated

the brittle polyps of a lunar barrier reef

to keel haul the moon when she’s riding low

over the extinct lava beds of her last rapture

for the cost of an atmosphere and the loss of an ocean.

I’m dog paddling in space without a life jacket on.

People look for words to express their feelings.

I’ve had to transmute a whole new grammar

out of the stem cells of my voice just to

hear myself think without anyone else talking for me.

So you fussed with language over a lifetime?

And you reek of poetry like a cheap cologne

you synthetically distilled from your garden of transplants

not wholly adapted to the soil they grow in

though you’ve uprooted all the weeds to the letter.

But what’s that compared to speaking in tongues

people haven’t been born to speak yet?

You can only write about so much life

as has mastered you at first sight

and if none of your emotions is crazed with hunger

the winners don’t get to plead for a second chance.

The garden is torched by dandelions.

The hydra-headed hollyhocks are toppled by the wind.

I exalt in the liberty of an unattainable excellence.

I fail greatly at everything I achieve.

I believe in what makes the night bird sing

as if its longing weren’t a secret the aspens

didn’t keep to themselves. I can see

no purpose to autumn, no clear reason for spring.

Whenever I forgo my intention, I accomplish

so much more than I could assess in a lifetime.

Never had a thought that wasn’t shadowed by a feeling

but I’ve never resorted to espionage

given my awareness is intelligent space

and the clouds of unknowing soon dissipate into stars.

I don’t look for periodicity in the clock of the rain.

The puncture wounds of childhood outgrow their scars

like expanding universes hype the Big Bang.

I build telescopes out of broken windowpanes

unaligned with the axis of the earth.

I made a quantum leap of faith into the unexplained.

I’ve got a unified field theory I call my mind.

I’m the remaining eye of a delusion that illuminates reality.

Just like a star. By the time you see it, it’s left you behind.

PATRICK WHITE

LINES FROM THE BLOODHOUSE

LINES FROM THE BLOODHOUSE

Expecting the worst because it is always now

and now is always the downfall of time,

the doomstroke of the present pulse

that goes off like an alarm clock in the grave

that no one will wake up to

but a lonely few raving in their sleep

feverish with dream, I look upon

the tribulation of the willow beyond tears,

the fury of the flagellant pines

that thrash the troubled air to keep from breaking,

the garbled flight plans of the veering birds,

and, prophet of the obvious, presage

the coming of a storm to break you

like a mirror of stagnant water

on the meteoritic thrones

of your igneous foundation stones.

Were you elected by the stars

to skull the earth with bombs,

to crater, gouge and scorch the playgrounds

of the obsolete children

waiting in their makeshift hospitals

for arms you tore from them like daisies; “she

loves me; she loves me not,” until

the night pours metal in their eyes

to seed the fire-fruits of their flowering

that has suddenly matured

in front of the guns and cameras

into a windfall of silent, acrid hearts

buried like landmines in the dazzling road

of their scorned flesh?

And they die for oil, they die

for the corporate spiders pulling the strings

of the Punch and Judy puppet governments

that tour the morgues like spring;

for bridges and contractors, power-lines

and power lunches, foreign policies

that brain them like the jawbone of an ass

they die, in their pyjamas, in their beds,

a kiss goodnight, and their prayers

imploring the disconnected dark to enlarge

the acceptable quotas of civilian dead

like the posters of the martyrs

on the walls of their rooms

shaken by the distant thunder

of computer-guided patriots and prophets

cooking their cities like God. And tomorrow

and tomorrow and tomorrow they die

in twisted, tormented convulsions

of agony and baffled blood they die and die,

learning to read and count

the names and years of their relatives

in the liberated souks of democratic cemeteries, alif

beh teh theh jim, F-l8, they master their lessons

and die in their thousands

because an executive cabal of miserable old men

with platitudes and prosthetic missiles for dicks

are into kiddie-porn snuff flicks

and biblical memoirs of all they begot

for the providence and profits

that redress the way they rot.

Acknowledging that this is not a hallmark greeting card,

I put it to you in the name

of your own enlightened self-interest,

in the name of a heart that isn’t

congested with a fashionable indifference,

in the name of a natural decency

that doesn’t need a teacher, in the name

of the families you came from

and the families you work for,

the daughter that falls asleep with you on the couch

like an island in the eye of a hurricane, the son

who listens to everything you say

as if he were kicking through bushels of autumn leaves

and then steals your car keys,

and your half-estranged wife, hoping

you’ll notice her hair-do at dinner, your mother,

the evangelist of baby pictures, and your father

softly overgrown like an old stone wall;

in the name of teen-age lovers

and their sophomoric glues, in the name

of calcium postal-clerks who smile

like Easter seals; in the name of iron men

with empty wallets, in the name

of the huge, lonely roses in all night bars

that bloom like scabs on the moon and know

they’re not pretty, in the name of physicists

and cabdrivers with chunks of quantum hash,

in the name of the angry crossroads in the singer’s voice,

in the name of the name of the insecure poet

whose last word fell like a drop of water

from a trembling blade of stargrass, I put it to you

because you are not a toad in front of a football game,

because you are not

a pebble-minded cosmetician in a delirium of pink, because

even in a shopping-mall you can feel and bleed and think,

and though you may be slow, you’re thorough

when it comes to putting on new brakes,

and though I know you don’t know what I mean

when I tell you that even the rocks, even

the rarest of ores we draw from the earth

like secret kings and artificial hearts

are freaked with seams of mystic gangrene

that will sever us like bells of blood

from the gardens of the gods we hope for,

rotten hinges from the gates,

bad meat from the starwells; you’re seer enough

to intuit the theme. It’s not about honey,

it’s about lies and death and money

devouring families like yours; it’s about

rich men gigantic with greed

and nations of thugs and thieves

infesting the earth like maggots in an abbattoir,

manipulating what everyone believes,

defaming the weak and the poor, war after war,

to glut themselves on more and more and more

until all of life is nothing but a toxic insight,

and there are children everywhere tonight

making the news, hoping

they’ll need their shoes in the morning,

bleeding through their bandages like dawn.

Famine, disease, war, poverty and ignorance,

under what sign was this planet born

that this should be the birthmark of black stars

that forsake the constellation

burning like a kite

tangled in the powerlines?

And do not tell me these abominations, these

ominous eclipses of the heart

that fit the skull with lichens and cataracts

sunspots, polar caps and death shroud victory flags

are the labour of mineral casinos

playing the sluts and slots of chance

for a material immortality composing sexual requiems

on the keyboards of our genes.

These are the smiles of old scythes,

rusted and bloody,

that reap what they do not sow,

the chronic harvest of blood, bone, tears and flesh

threshed by the rotating blades of the moon;

these are the wounds and gashes,

the indecipherable science and scripture of scars

that stroke the lunar fury of the wild boars who plough with tusks,

the salt and lime and ashes that spice

the tasteless, eyeless, childless grave

with famous reasons for murder. These

are the ballroom courtesies of dancing cannibals,

these are the mothering headphones

of a twenty year old tank commander

who smothers the screams of casual children

in his video line of fire

with the curative gasolines of American rock and roll.

These are the occult imperatives

of cosmic ghouls whose mouths

are roses of blood, whose idols and ethics

are praying mantises dismembering the world,

tent-caterpillars and locusts

blighting the leaf and the grain

with the eggs and afterlives of imperial insects.

These are the arcane scales

of old serpents sloughing skins

like epochs and empires and straitjackets

that couldn’t contain the life within

the market gardens of original sin, these

are the hinges of its gaping jaws

and these the fangs and poisons

of its septic laws undone like lynch pins

to take the whole world in, disgorging again

the used condoms, the withered shells

of the nations and nests they’ve plundered.

Let the blind ambassador

whose morals are as breezy as his teeth

number the spoon-fed nightmares

propped up like dolls in unnegotiated corners,

their glass eyes open for keeps

like guide dogs at the fatal intersections

of dark, delinquent streets

that only the children cross,

hysterical in sleep. Let him explain

to the pillows of the children in the furnace

why their feathers will never make a bird that flys;

let him explain to the bracelets and bells,

the twilight of hair in the comb,

the glacial sages preserved in the cracks of the mirror,

the drowned lumber of mothers

dismantled by violent coasts, their children

snagged like cod in the purses of political fishing nets,

why death is the only guarantor of human liberty,

let him choose his words carefully

as if he were loading a gun with birthday candles,

let him drop seedlings in the bullet holes

and talk of future forests gleefully

to the press corps generals

spewing pulp fiction like chainsaws in a feeding frenzy.

Let him mark well the small graves in the footnotes

of his text, the fragile starmaps of braille

that will later come forward like witnesses

to accuse his sterling composition

of the mountainous corals of the dead,

all the polyp people that he brained into stone bread.

And when like death he’s out of a job,

let him run eagerly door to door

delivering newspapers to the mob

like personal resumes, or let him carve gravestones

for unofficial children

on the dead letterhead of his own.

Then take the presidents, the bankers,

the ministers, executives, and pimps

equipped with the long spoons and supple shovels

of their death-divining tongues

and let them dig like star-nosed moles

deep holes in the earth for the corpses of the young,

black poppies in the shadow of a white-washed bloodhouse

enthroned on a summit of dung.

PATRICK WHITE