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 abattoir,

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

SAVAGE ASHTRAY

SAVAGE ASHTRAY

In the early grey morning trying to tune the tinny rain

to the fleeting keys of the pentatonic birds,

a bad musician lost in the labyrinth of its ear

like a spider or a sodden note with too many sad flags

caught in the torn stave of its saturated web,

I arrive like a messenger from far coasts

and the exotic nightlife of the bright cities of the stars,

having crossed the passionate ocean of the poppy

that dared her maiden voyage in a bottle.

And I say to myself, because no one is listening, behind seawalls

of black coffee and rolled cigarettes

because I own no part of the sky, no

fraction of the leaking house I’m quartered in

with a library of pleading guestbooks I refuse to sign:

look for the secret gold in the crumbling foundation stone,

pull yourself out of the rock like a charmed sword

or the mad ore of a sad crown in a kingdom of one.

But pauper that I am, I’ve never managed more

than an empty throne, and the antiquated office chair I sit in

was crafted from the timber of burnt windowsills

I rescued like eyelashes from the cooling ashes

of my last revision of the schools of weeping glass

who loved the flaring of the mystic arsonist I used to be.

Whole generations can die in the pause

between one heartbeat and the next and I don’t remember

when it was that I woke up older than the rain

that once derailed my affair with a married sphinx,

but yesterday is not a bruise I want to wear tomorrow

and today is not wise enough to guess the riddle of my sorrow.

More amused than bitter in the expanding interim

of my cosmic solitude, there are graves ahead

I feel compelled to answer from the irrefutable depths

of the opulent silence that owes my voice

a god and a name. And there are roads that I must lead home again,

adopted rivers that have never met their natural headwaters,

and valleys full of fireflies I must endow like brides

before the waxing crescent of the autumn moon

severs the fruit from the wombs of their lachrymose guitars.

And I am weary and scared and inconsolably alone

in the stern mirrors of the morning that reflect my face

like an apology that came too late to make a difference,

or bridge the distance between one beginning

and the next. This is my life, I tell myself, and hope I’m lying.

This is the blue stairwell of my irremissible longing

to suffer the unattainable until I am wholly transformed

in a single embrace, to die with eyes, to heal the wounded beast of coal

so much like nightfall in my blood with salves of flowing diamond,

or crawl from the ashes of miscreant angels with wings.

This is my life on earth as it is, and this who I am in the changing.

a lightning rod in a makeshift morgue

trying to raise myself from the vast surrender of the dead

I was born among to weld their chains to the clouds

in a flash of liberation. And this is my life in the ruins

of darker aspirations that squandered its victory bells

in useless assaults against the intransigent walls of heaven,

the adamant gates of hell. And should I now deny

out here in the open with my small army of masks

depleted by desertion, what I haven’t even admitted to myself?

There never was a way to wage peace against a world

collegiately braced for war. There never was a way

to campaign for love and survive the treaties and truces

that snarled like poison kisses on the cheek of the moon

I could not turn, the bitter cups and skulls and crazy wines

of the sacrificial knives it kept refilling like a garden.

So now there’s this exordium of islands and exiles like me

buried every step of the wayless way ahead

in our own footprints, casualties of the blessings and bullets that missed.

This is my life, and I will not decry it like a stormbird

off the precipitous coasts of savage ashtrays

nor haunt the shore with reading lamps to jackal through the salvage.

PATRICK WHITE

SOMETHING BEAUTIFUL, LYRICAL, TENDERLY HEART-FELT

SOMETHING BEAUTIFUL, LYRICAL, TENDERLY HEART-FELT

Something beautiful, lyrical, tenderly heart-felt

like a child reaching out of its innocence

to test a bruise that used to hurt

but now has mellowed into a wild flower

with just a touch of local colour.

Wild irises among the breathless willows

along the shores of the Tay River

adjusting the catfish to its flow

like underwater weathervanes

and it’s summer on earth

and the sun ripens like a tomato

on the inside of your eyelids

and the hum of the dragonflies

buzzing your ear like a flight control tower

lulls you into a narcosis of physical well-being

when even an hour of being so at peace with life

as it is, was, appears, ought to be or not,

the distinctions are as unreal

as water consulting a nautical chart,

and even time stops judging things by its first impressions.

Something easy, inclusive, and true as it needs to be

without going to any special efforts.

Just to lie back in the fresh summer grass

and wish you were a white horse

with a black star under your forelock

that could graze upon the young blades

that smell so much like cool green peas

and stare into the endless cerulean blue of a sky

with an eye for antique clouds

the burgundy-tipped brushes of the birches

are scumbling a little alizarin crimson into

just to warm things up a bit.

I want to see wet mammals

gleaming with water and light

sliding down a mud bank back into the river

otters, muskrats, beavers,

and forget all about evolution

like any other corporate utility

that can wait to be paid.

The turkey-vultures and the red-tailed hawk

circling high overhead without disturbing

a feather on their wings

when they’re riding their thermals for the sheer joy of it,

like kids sliding down a bannister

that find the most fun in what

there’s the least purpose in

and even less reason to question.

I want to look upon life

as if its only secret agenda

is as it always has been

hidden out in the open

for everyone’s eyes only.

I want to let my mind

sprawl and cluster as it will

like the waterlilies in lieu of stars

giving illustrious astronomy lessons

inside the dark planetarium

of the abandoned beaver hut

on the far shore

that’s just as big a mystery

as the disappearance of the Mayans.

For the moment I don’t

want to go anywhere a maple tree

wouldn’t grow of its own accord

whether it made it through

the first few winters or not.

Listen to the leaves on the aspens

lapping like the small waves

of an incoming tide of shadows

as the afternoon slowly withdraws its assent

like a hand from the hand of a sleeping lover

to reveal your sacred absence when she wakes up

like the best gift you had to give her

though she’d never dream

of asking for so much.

Powder-blue eyeshadow on the damselflies.

My spiritual dakini dancing voluptuously

making Hindi hand gestures of light

that flash off the backs of black watersnakes

that roll with the waves

like a melody to music

your whole body hears

like serpent-fire roaring through a chimney

to clear its throat of birds.

Enlightenment might be akin

to galloping on a horse through a busy market

without bumping into anyone.

There are enough fools who doubt it

to convince you there must be some truth to it,

but here where the red-winged blackbird

sings from the dead branch

as often as the green bough,

the deathless insight is effortless

and ignorance and enlightenment

are just the front and back doors of bliss

in this house of life that takes a worm

and turns it into a Monarch butterfly

or takes a landscape

and turns it into a state of mind,

a dynamic equilibrium among opposites

that stand before each other

like a man before a mirror

without one asking the other

which of them is real.

Not as I am but as it is

is true of everything in creation

from the atoms in a lost osprey feather

on up to the superclustering of black holes

like voodoo dolls in the hearts of the starfish

who gather in covens to sacrifice their light

to the darkness, making a ritual

of the natural order of events

emerging from the chaos of a random universe

like a school of fish

or the flight of birds

or even the improbable concourse of these words

when they all swerve the same way.

Reeds in the river.

The hair of the willows.

A human who seeks peace in a low place

down by the water

and lets his thoughts go along

with the flow of things

like the main theme of a waterclock

with a heart and a bloodstream

discrete enough to ignore me for a while

as I drift like an empty lifeboat down the Tay River

like one of my unmoored poems

whenever I am whatever it is

standing in the shadows of the answer

that’s been liberated from the slavery

of responding to the question that belabours it.

We are consummate nothingness.

The metaphoric vapours of a drug we inhale

like the fragrance of white sweet clover,

distillations and elixirs of the moon

we drink from our own skulls,

semaphoric fireflies waiting for the stars

to answer back, shapeshifters

bending space to the shape

of our momentary cosmic minds

to have everything fall into place prophetically

like wild grapevines into bottles of dated wine.

Go ask the water if a reflection

standing on its own two feet

like a mirage of stars in the desert cold

of the upper atmosphere

waiting for someone at a wishing well

is any less real than one that’s lying down

to look up at the passing clouds

until it disappears like a mirror

that doesn’t inhibit them

into whatever they’re the image of

in a fraction of sunlight

on the wing of a blue heron

startled into flight by something

on the far side of the river.

Mesmerized by the mystic specificity

of the extraordinarily ordinary,

one dandelion in a wild raspberry patch

overwhelming it like a tsunami,

the fate that must have befallen

the one-legged gull

I gave bread to here last summer

favouring him above all

to humanize the radical impersonality

of the randomly accidental

that did this to a bird

without purpose, will, or meaning,

I sit here among these,

my senses attuned

to the vagaries of consciousness

as they’re beaten off like crows

by nesting sparrows

or keep a journal like a leaf

that set out young to explore the river

like a water god that went looking for water

and found it when he came upon

what remained of himself and cried

when things went oceanic

as if it had happened to someone else.

Something beautiful, lyrical, tenderly heart-felt.

Two ruby-throated hummingbirds

hovering over a bouquet of daylilies

like single quotes.

PATRICK WHITE

SQUALLS OF RUSTY LEAVES CLINGING TO A TREE IN WINTER

SQUALLS OF RUSTY LEAVES CLINGING TO A TREE IN WINTER

Squalls of rusty leaves clinging to a tree in winter

like the pages of a perfectly bound book,

the memoirs of a fire that refused to go out

like the gypsy scarves of the poppies,

dry, rattling, skulls encrusted by the firepits

of their own laurels. So many of my generation,

the sixties, the fabled seed beds of a dead revolution,

the distant thunder of a creative firestorm

that flowed back into its watershed like a black snake

after the lightning struck the sacred tree.

Cratered, pitted mantles with thinning atmospheres

on the surface of rogue planets still looking

for that one mystic star they’ll orbit

like comets with their greying ponytails forever

if they ever find it. But don’t be too quick to judge

the heart of the original nightbird on the basis

of a fading echo with a long way to go yet.

Just below the surface of the reflexive symbols

that have worn out the knees of the shrines

and devotees who made peace signs

instead of the sign of the cross, just below

the volcanic islands of the scars they’re marooned on,

the effusive swords of their edgy insights

cooling out in a tempering sea of awareness,

there’s still a hot, magmatic core of dragon sages

dancing in the ashes of a dead furnace

that approached them like a matchbook

that thought it was the peer and master

of their ageing green cremations at a rain dance.

Don’t throw cold water on a dreaming wolf until

you’ve checked its teeth to see if it snarls

with the broken crescents of a waning moon

or the turning world has kept its pencils sharp

as the point it’s about to make for enlightenment’s sake.

Even in my own heart, I can hear the pathos

in the voice of the wolf shaman calling

the few who remained faithful to their prayers,

like a savage muezzin in the mountains

of a brutal solitude that knows what hour it is.

If it grows dark around me even as I write

that doesn’t mean I’m editing myself out of the light.

That’s just a sixties way of conjuring the stars to come out.

Who hasn’t stood in the starmud up to their necks

in the infinities of the chronic rapture

of a sixties think tank of one very spaced-out brain

cauterized by bliss burn? The generations lie down

one upon the other like layers of sediment settling

out of the turmoil of their sky bound puddles like new skin

on cosmic river bottoms, today’s cambium,

tomorrow’s heartwood. Dark absorption lines

around the eyes of an emission spectrum. Black

calendars scarred on the vulture femurs

of the bird bone flutes of Archaic Indians lying

in their graves by the Straits of Belle Isle.

Takes a while, but it perpetually happens.

It’s going to happen to you, just like that

medieval clique of skeletons said. As we are now

so will you be one of these mystic bagladies

or homeless revolutionaries out trying to trade

the whole wardrobe of the emperor’s new clothes

for a few rags of retroactive fashion. The duff

of the autumn leaves collaged into wet albums

on the forest floor of radicals returning to their roots

one last time before the snow falls. The setting star

doesn’t shine any less brighter than

the new debutantes of lucidity rising in the east.

We ran before the storm awhile like birds

that delighted in the riot and the madness

of its creatively destructive, dark energies.

We burned cities, trying to make love not war.

We gnawed through the chains of the anchors

of moonboats in the ports of lunar drydocks

even as we jumped ship like rats on friendly terms

with the dragons of the Chinese zodiac.

Civil rights, anti-war protests, feminism efoliate,

this time with thorns, ecological paracletes

intervening on behalf of the pimped-out earth,

water, air, earth, fire, four poor girls

whored in the stables of the corporate flesh market,

and a sexual revolution that broke the locks

on the stocks of the witch-hunting Puritans

who burned the bodies of women like candles

fearful of the lunar power of their own housewells,

fierce hypocrites who thinned the blood in their veins

into the formic acids of nettles and ants,

into the vicious beginning of their one letter alphabet

of red ink that kept sinking deeper in arrears to God

because they lived their lies like pincers on a lightning rod.

Major regret. No work revolution to undo

the immorality of enjoying what you do for a living

instead of accepting it as a purifying karmic scourge

for the evil and the guilt of having been born

to hard labour on a chain gang without parole.

It’s sixties just to point out that the Upanishads say

work should be a form of worship, or in Zen,

a do, an enlightenment path, or closer to home,

a begging bowl. In the aftermath of the cosmic cocktails

of chemicals for herbivores with poetic sounding names,

the apocalyptic spirit went supernova and the remnants

of the excruciating ecstasy came up like a moonrise

of manic mushrooms that shaved their heads

like magic monks in a cult of future afterlives.

I saw the maharanis kiss the serpent on the head

and get away with it. I’ve lapped the marrow of music

out of the fossilized bird bone flutes

that tried to charm the snakepit and got bit because

music hasn’t got charms to soothe all savage breasts.

Over now. With this proviso. No star ever

says farewell to its light however far

it travels from its original fountainmouth,

wavelengths away from the first flash of insight

like the continuum of the wind, or space and time.

Things may be diverted by gravitational third eyes,

and, yes, so many have imploded on themselves

like black dwarfs that yesterday were fireflies of the spirit,

and others brood like dark ore deep within themselves

over secret motherlodes of white gold

that glows like wheat in the moonlight

in the wake of a silver plough sowing stars

in the furrows of their terraced brows

that are timed to germinate long after they’re gone,

gone, gone, gone, altogether gone beyond.

Lucidity surprised by the lengthening shadows it cast

like a rookery of crows in a psychedelic sunset.

Chimney sparks by the moody cresosote of old fires

that aspired to the stars like nightbirds

caught in their own throats when the darkness

overwhelmed them with the unattainability

of the best things in life to reach for

like brilliant failures with an artist’s nostalgia

for a lost cause that went into exile voluntarily,

some like asteroids of the Orphic dismemberment

of a whole generation, some like hyperbolic comets

fallen from their dark haloes turning once around the sun

like tracers following the flightpath of their own ricochets,

and some, you’ve seen them, emanating

from the invisible radiants of well-thumbed zodiacs,

like the lion and bull gates of meteor showers

that can still thrill the marvellous children

with the fireworks of their creative immolations

as another generation shrieks in glee realizing

their own freedom in the high jinx

of the sacred clowns and amazing lunatics

blooming in orbit like wildflowers protesting

the way the earth passed every day into night

without opening its eyes to the wonders of itself

strewn in its path like the tarnished haloes

of moondogs we once reached for like brass rings

that gored us like matadors on our own horns

as we bled to death in an eclipse of roses

in the magic ashpits of their oracular thorns.

PATRICK WHITE