TENDERLY THE EVENING DESCENDS INTO A DARK BLISS

TENDERLY THE EVENING DESCENDS INTO A DARK BLISS

Tenderly the evening descends into a dark bliss

and lays its poultice like a cool leaf against my forehead

and draws the fever of the day out of the night.

I ease back on my elbows like an easel down by the river.

When I’m burnt, I make a blister

and cushion myself with water,

a more useful approach to tears.

The mosquitoes swarm like insistent circumstances

that thin my blood, but a soft wind

is blowing them away from Pearl Harbour.

The long blue grass yields as easily to a man as a deer.

I want the stars near enough to overhear what they’re whispering.

Still amazing to me I can embrace all of them with a thought

as if they were my idea in the first place

and feel humbled and exalted at the same time

by the sublimity of their radiance and the strangeness of my own.

The river sustains its clarity by wandering.

Single male in the autumn of life, I’ve let go of so much

the only thing left to let go of is the letting go itself.

I’ve forgone the commotion of inducing myself into creation.

Things will fall out by themselves. Playfulness

return to surrealistic perversity

to explain the shape of the universe

and fools like me counter-intuit the crazy wisdom

of squandering their lives on voices in the distance

leading them on deeper into the subtleties of a poetic narcosis

that haunts them like the face

of a beautiful woman they once knew.

Don’t we all belong to a nobility of longing, even though

we don’t live up to it, and start to grasp and scratch

like dead branches screeching across

an intransigent windowpane on a stormy night

that let’s us look at the fire, but doesn’t let us in?

Where do you go with your serious spirit

when you’ve been rejected by your solitude?

Do you know the secret art of being enhanced

by the qualities of anything you’re not attached to,

without killing off the desire for what you’re missing?

Live with gratitude for the abyss in your heart

it’s impossible to fill like a grave

that took more out of you than it put back in.

You can be adorned by your failures.

You can be humiliated by your victories.

Coming and going, your path can be strewn

with roses or thorns. You could be walking on stars.

You could be lying down beside a river at night like I am

savouring a sorrow you like the poetic taste of,

because it includes everything within it

like the skin of the dew and the moon as the source of life.

Even sweeter than a rainbow body of light

or an atmosphere with ocean to match,

this last touch of clinging before you evaporate

into the mystery of everything you’re leaving behind.

No more than you can pour water out of the universe

through a black hole, can your mindstream be poured by time

into the uncomprehending darkness of the black mirror

you’re looking for an image in tonight

in the eyes of all these stars shining down upon us,

knowing our starmud is just as old as their light

and we’re not wandering orphans lost in their shadows.

We’re firewalking on water like stars in the shapes

of self-immolating swans, two parts flammable

from the start, and one of oxygen like a toxin

we depend upon for life like an alien export we adapted to.

Same with death. Until you include it in the nucleus,

inviting your enemy in to feast behind the gates

that laboured like water to keep life in the seas,

you’re vulnerable to the delusion of your own exclusion

like the face of an exile in your mirroring awareness.

Don’t underestimate the creative potential

of the dark genius of death to come up

with new paradigms of seeing and being

that make us feel we lived our whole lives

confined and blind in the coffin of a seed

that stored a harvest of what we’ve reaped in a silo.

Out of the dead ore of the moon

pours the white gold of wheat

like metal from a stone in a starfield

that yields more life than can be lost

in the living of it. Without a sword. Without a ploughshare.

Isn’t it in the nature of our evanescence to move

like light and water and wind from urn to urn

of one sky burial to the next at sea and then the earth

like a water clock that runs so urgently

from full to an emptiness that has to keep expanding

like the human heart just to contain it

so when the cup’s broken like a skull

you can drink the whole of the sea and the sky

in every single drop of your mindstream

and the stars will still be climbing your roots

up to the flowers within that bloom every year

like a deepening insight at zenith into

the dark generosity of becoming something

even beyond the scope of death to imagine extinct.

PATRICK WHITE

HOWEVER GRATIFIED I AM

HOWEVER GRATIFIED I AM

However gratified I am, always I’m left with a hunger

for something more than I’ve tasted before

as if my emptiness were not perfect yet and I were

ready to let everything ride on a single throw of my skull

up against the wall just to see what falls out of its own will,

or change my species once in a while. Over-reaching

perhaps, spiritual pleonaxia, something amiss with my heart

or maybe I just don’t want to be left behind, resigned

to an expanding universe I can’t keep up with.

Things are as they are. It’s clear. My mind’s a hawk

with the blinders off. I’ve thawed the diamond.

Enlightenment flows through my heart like electricity.

I’m shining. I don’t need a star to find my way home in the dark.

I can look upon the earth demonically.

I can see it through the eyes of the angel.

But the fireflies have taught me all they have to share.

And the lightning looks like a slacker compared

to the discipline I exact from myself just to

shock me out of the old growth forest in my heartwood

like a chainsaw, despite the nails I’ve hammered into it

like a crucifix without a saviour, an ark without a sail.

Though I’ve beamed like the full moon out over the harvest

the bounty of life never quite fills me all the way up to the brim.

I’m always a drop shy of my longing for completion,

as if there were always a crack in the cup I drank from.

And this agony has summoned me for years

from as far back as my beginningless beginnings

like a bell that swings both ways between sex and death

and though I answer it like the s.o.s. of a lapwing

by the time I get there, it’s irrevocably gone

as if it were just a ruse that were leading me on.

Deeper into life? Though what I make of it, like the stars,

I make alone? No trysts on the rainbow bridge at midnight?

No god to rejoice in these works of love within me?

No abyss to delight in the sheer absurdity of it?

A gleeman, a jester, a sacred clown, a morose fool,

a mystic, a scholar, a sailor that went down with the ship

just to stay true to the spirit of the storm within me,

an open doorway for the dead to come and go as they please,

an astronomical prodigy, an optician of mirrors and prisms,

a cowboy Zen master who rode into town on a seahorse,

a poet living on the edge of the word that thrives like weeds

around the graves in the cemeteries of the dead metaphors

I’m always digging up like a dog who buried a bone.

A gardener on the moon, an usher of history, a lover

who learned to sing like a martyr in the flames

of a gnostic heresy that gave up all its claims to knowledge,

a triviality that mentored the grand scheme of things

in the mystic specificity of not just the cosmos,

but the chaos under our noses as well, and all these avatars,

this pageant of characters I look back on now

like a children’s crusade, consumed like straw dogs

in the fires of their adoration, and the smoke they left

like a script on the air, unencompassed by any direction of prayer.

A lunar mirage behind a veil of heat, a delusion of water

I raise to the lips of the man on the moon to drink slowly

from his own hands, and the mouth of the man he sees in them.

I hang on a hook through my gut in the air and speak

in tongues of pain nemetic forecasts of the New Year

as a volunteer for the mystic excruciation of agony into bliss,

without insisting that it should be so, and each time

I say next year that’s going to be effortless, but it never is.

I’ve tried denying it to win its affirmation.

I’ve tried affirming it to have it issue a denial

and still it haunts my solitude like a mute siren I can’ t resist.

And don’t want to hear. And don’t want to listen to.

This undemanding imperative to live more deeply, more darkly

than I ever have before such that all my dragons

are diminished into fireflies at a distance by comparison

trying to burn their way out of the blackholes

I enter like a rite of passage I can’t do anything but trust

to the other side of why I risk so much to be here.

I can hear the wind howling through me like a wounded wolf

cauterizing its heart with stars. No mercy on the mountain,

I steel my blood cells with the carbon of old extinctions

and eat the pain, gnawing on a bone in my mouth.

Praying to my own echo for silence, cessation, release,

without taking a step backward over the edge of where I came from.

Let it come, let it come, let it come, encounter or collision the same,

exit or entrance, gate, wall, consummation or the upper limit

of it all just before it turns into a windfall of beginner’s luck

and I’m the chance it takes I’m not playing dice with the universe.

That there’s more to learn from a curse than a blessing.

That all this isn’t just an agonizing farce of humourless shadows,

non-spatial impersonalities slowly being humanized

by life masks of scar tissue as a way of facing up to things.

That a calling isn’t just a matter of putting up a plaque

to commemorate the garden life was first introduced to time in.

That humans weren’t just born to be sundials of the flesh.

That suffering is a dark enlightenment that’s mother of the stars

and compassion tastes of the tears of the tree it ripened on.

That ego isn’t the king of thorns in a world full of balloons.

Or if so. A rose is a mere rhetorical device of the blood

and there’s nothing beautiful about a puncture wound

to a mythically-inflated universe waiting for a heart transplant.

That art’s just the phoney climax of an unbearable impotence

that breeds cunning and guile as an antidote to spontaneity

and it’s an indictable offence to bear true witness

to the untenable relationship between the fiction of beauty

and the delirium of meaning that follows in its wake

like gulls behind a river barge of surgically removed body parts

being dumped out at sea like bad meat down a neighbour’s well.

Anomie. Ennui. Menses and memes of homogenous angst. Normalcy

of reflexive desecration. Solipsistic nihilism. Home-grown anarchy.

Gnats in the dusk. Frenzied star clusters. Saddles without horses

lined up seriatim along the fence like the pelvises of extinct animals

waiting to get asked to the dance by a water ballet of wheelchairs.

Schools of thought slyly amended by X-box.

Heavily armed poets buying bad ammunition for their books

and the clarity of a life that was never there to return to

going through violent paroxysms of withdrawal in de tox.

Locusts dying in the starfields they swarmed like civilization.

Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow?

I’m out here in the weeds, ploughing the moon back under.

Let the seeds fall where they will on any night of the calendar.

Intense heat. Unusual sprouts. I’m not a hunter, not a farmer.

No ploughshares beaten into swords, no swords into bells.

I don’t read meanings into what I sow like dragons’ teeth,

open gates to let things in and out or through.

I was an exile in progress the day before I was born

to be returned to my solitude like a waterclock

of siloes and urns on the moon scattering my ashes

among the stars that bloom to be consumed by their hunger,

as it is becoming increasingly clear to me I do

like a salmon leaping upstream against the flow of time,

to spoonfeed the abyss an elixir of remedial eyes.

PATRICK WHITE

DON'T KNOW WHOSE SCHOOL IT IS

DON’T KNOW WHOSE SCHOOL IT IS

Don’t know whose school it is, but three days a month

for the last few years it’s been trying to teach me

not to care about the things I’ve cherished most in life.

One of the sunset attitudes of old age? Maybe. Though

the jury’s out for lack of circumstantial evidence.

Even apocalypse disengages, but I see a glorious sunset

in the manes of the old lions driven out to walk alone like wisemen

who don’t want to go through all that ferocity again.

The sorrows ripen like bitter, green days into mellower dusks

vivid with swallows. The earth has been at things a long time.

Like a shoemaker that knows her craft. Like a midwife

and an undertaker on the same nightward, listening

to people die in their dreams like train whistles passing through.

The dead come and go here in this small town as

unceremoniously most of the time as they do anywhere else.

You’re friends or enemies with someone for forty years

and suddenly, one day, they just disappear, and you’re given

a few details and facts as to why, and everyone acts contrite

and steps back from the grave because they’re afraid,

prayers, testimonials and floral wreathes laid,

and you realize what a trivial gesture life is compared

to the immense forevers we occupy when we run out of time.

People hang breezy curtains over a black hole

and live on the other side of them peeking out their windows

as if they were looking through a glass darkly

at the solar coronas and haloes of a total eclipse,

trying to make light of how eyeless it is out.

Even the Neanderthals threw cornflowers

like the paint rags of blue skies in the graves of their children.

The dead stare straight up and the living mourn for themselves.

Life goes on as everyone swears it must as if

we were being whipped in some kind of Oregon land rush

to lay a claim to an idyllic cemetery of good bottom land

down by the river, or atop a hill, with a beautiful view

for the pioneer kids who died of scarlet fever

to watch the waterbirds returning to the flooded marsh below

as if there were hope for them yet. Pythagorean

transmigrations of souls in the bodies of birds

or the hearses of Canada geese that carry the Ojibway dead

south and west, once the bones in their medicine huts are dust,

aviaries of angels singing them to their rest.

Raleigh in the Tower the night before his death.

We live in jest, but we die in earnest. Though that strikes me

as more of a trope than a truth, at best, a good guess

it’s just as easy to go along with for the sake of the rhyme

as it is to contest the conclusion until you get there,

keeping in mind Emily Dickinson heard a fly buzz when she died.

Ever listen to an old man trying to be clever about his death?

How odiously underdeveloped it seems. I think animals

are more honest when the hawk falls and the rabbit screams.

Grey hair on the mountain and you’re stilling going

through a sea change of the Burgess Shale as if

you’re never going to grow out of yourself into something new.

Is personality retained like the Conservation of Data Principle

even in a black hole? Once here, though we always had to be,

are we indelible? The mindstreams of flooded pens

that can’t be washed out of our pockets even by

the great night sea of awareness that’s swimming toward us now?

Roman short swords of the gladiolas are sprouting

in the heritage cemetery like green scissors or the beaks

of insatiable baby birds beseeching their mother.

Fifty thousand thoughts a day, not counting

the infinite elaboration of incommensurable emotions.

I can’t look at a grave without thinking of the Library of Alexandria.

Skull bulbs. Do you believe there’s a connection?

Uneasy the sleep of the man who goes to bed at night

thinking he’s a success. Life walks us to our graves

and every step of the way we’ve been crossing thresholds

that are neither exits nor entrances in or out of here.

What a strange dream to believe it might be possible

to be fossilized by your own biosphere. Life doesn’t

let you linger in the doorway for very long before

it slams the coffin lid in your face for not stepping in

when you’re asked, for fear of tracking starmud into the house

as you did at the beginning, as you will at the end.

And this is the brave part. Either learn to drown

like a sea star in the efoliant oceans of the rose

or get ready to be lowered down into the ground

like a lifeboat that doesn’t float. Even as far as China

if you’re out seeking knowledge of spiritual states

or the Beagle rounding the coast of Tierra del Fuego.

Holy ghosts and Hox genes, mass, gravity, space, time,

light, matter, black and white, annihilant energies

quantumly entangled in each other’s creative lives

in the Vas Hermeticum of the alchemical earth

breeding regal quatternios of golden life

out of the ore of base metal, effluvial waterlilies

out of their own putrefaction. Conceptually neat

and numerically comforting, but emotionally unsatisfying

in its mystic details. The green dragon has mercurial eyes

that shine with a peculiar lustre all their own.

The most brilliant error a human can make

is to mistake themselves for an individual

they always wanted to meet. We die on familiar terms

with the strangers we’ve faithfully been to ourselves.

A mirage of fish pleading for the waters of life

from a housewell in a desert of stars when we’ve been

the real thing all along, though we keep seeking it

as if the inestimable gift were only of value

if and whenever we found it on our own. The Milky Way

smears a silver snail track across the starmap of the long way home.

Compassion compels the softer alloys of our souls

to humanize the oceanic abyss of consciousness that surrounds it

with habitable metaphors rooted in tangible sorrows and joys.

Even the earth must sometimes stop to wonder

if the dead ever miss it, and marvel at a flight of sea birds.

PATRICK WHITE  

NIGHT. A WHISPER OF RAIN

NIGHT. A WHISPER OF RAIN.

Night. A whisper of rain. Peace in my heart.

A penny on the third eye of the hurricane

I’ve been trying to ride out all day without

having it throw me off like a big cat on its back.

Farewell, turmoil. I retract my claws

like quotation marks and crescent moons

around the silence of your name.

The fallen pine boughs of your broken wings.

Inspiration doesn’t trample on things

like flowers and stars. No more. No more

of those feelings that were meant to be as famous

as a Trojan horse to a poet grazing on the plains of war.

Eyes running down the windowpane in tears

as if they were teaching it to cry. Listen to the rain

deepen the silence like the roots of silly flowers

when you fire the voice coach

and teach them to paint watercolours.

It’s sad. But I add that poignancy to the light

like a fragrance of the moon to an apple orchard

and let it dream like wine in the dark

until I taste it again in the windfalls of late September

and in the retreating rosaries of grace leaving like birds.

For the moment I am the inclusive intimacy

of a passion that doesn’t scorn the fruit of its outcome.

I kiss my skull the same way I kiss the blossom.

Come life, come death. Two feet on the same path.

I don’t split hairs like the wishbone of the road I’m on

and not expect to lose my way back home

wherever that is now the astrolabe is blind and starless

and I drift like a paper lifeboat in a truce with the sea.

I should raise naval flags like spring flowers

to signal the relative victory of a few short hours

but the candles have already sent the message in flames

and the shadows have answered: message received.

No need of tomorrow and much less of yesterday

let the moment tend to the affairs of its own will

I’m an apostate event unbound from the stake

of the irreligious history of the world trying

to burnish lead into gold in the wrath of a volcano god

someone met on the way to the promised land

and asked to join the caravan at the wells in Median

to compound the absurdity of visionary matchbooks

that rained manna and vipers from the opposite eyes

of the mirage of an hourglass skinny-dipping in the desert

to renew the virginity of time like a sundial on the moon.

Rare revelation to the changelings of lust

released on the river like prophetic decoys in a false dawn

to lure the waterbirds into friendly fields of fire

as if to say you can come this far, no higher.

There’s never been a star named after a human

except for Cor Caroli, the heart of Charles the Second,

dimly under Alcor and Mizar, the horse and the rider,

under the handle of the Big Dipper I raise to the lips

of a mermaid in the desert like real water

to a true believer in the midst of delusion

just to hear her sing again on the rocks of longing

like a waterclock on a windowpane in the rain.

And I don’t want to tie her to the bowsprit of a shipwreck

that went down at the end of her song,

the whole town on board this leaking ark

and she’s the only one that’s crying into a lifeboat

like a woman with her face in her hands at the news.

Forty nights and forty days of rain in the spring,

the earth’s a hydrocephalic with water on the brain.

And the roads are cobbled with sloppy frogs,

and the darkness is dense with a wardrobe of sorrows

that hangs in the air like an era of hesitation

above the crystal slipper dancing shoes and rubber boots

in the pungent closets of the watershed

that waltzes them like rain on the Tay River

under chandeliers of light-footed starmud

in the abandoned ballrooms of the willows dancing

like gusts of air to the heritage harps

that shine like constellations in their high-strung hair.

A train howls like a wounded animal in the distance,

an iron horse. The nightwatchmen have gone out

like fireflies, but not the streetlamps that have stayed on

like starmaps in the rain to walk the drunks home

arm in arm, crying in their cups like watered down wine.

Nothing divine, earthly or infernal, the eye of time

no more vernal in the east where the moon rises

than eternal in the west where the sun sets,

I’m not playing solitaire in the rain with old regrets,

I’m at peace with the stars that are caught like civilians

between storm fronts, as their seeds get washed away

like flower bombs in a flashflood of shell-shocked rivulets

someone stepped on by mistake. And I’d rather keep

the worst of my war-stories to myself, than swap them

with the vets being strafed by the rain of ricochets

in the Legion’s parking lot where things are fought all over again

as their wives usher them to the passenger side of their cars.

Just the rain and me. As if we were born a moment ago.

And neither of us had anything to fight about.

And I was the bud of a wound that hadn’t started bleeding yet,

like a shrieking poppy or a stoic rose, and it

wasn’t the cure that washed all the blood off

like a paint rag of a sail in a Pacific sunset hemorrhaging at sea.

Just the rain and me. Doing what we both do best.

And all our labour effortless as tears in the eyes of the night.

PATRICK WHITE

BEEN LIED TO SO LONG THE TRUTH STICKS OUT LIKE A SORE THUMB

BEEN LIED TO SO LONG THE TRUTH STICKS OUT LIKE A SORE THUMB

Been lied to so long the truth sticks out like a sore thumb

at three in the morning on a deserted highway. I know

some of you think you’re on top of this, but look again,

for all the applause that follows you around like an encore

of professional mourners, you’re not the lightning bolt. You’re

the weathervane, you’re the desk clerk, the hat check girl

that lives like a hot tip of insider trading for pittance

as everyone stops to ask in passing, did time leave any messages?

Nothing for you, I’m sorry, as you pick your spirit up off the floor

in both hands, on either side, like the luggage of death

and make for the door hoping you don’t get caught

as if you’d just stolen the moon like a half-used bar of soap.

Stray images from estranged mindscapes, heralds of smoke

gathering like ghosts at a seance ahead of the field fire

coming this way like a scorched earth policy of scarecrows

seeking lebensraum like real estate agents in the Ukraine.

I’ll take shelter among the stars. Even in the slums of grace

the houses of the zodiac are fireproof. I’ll tune my voice

like a flame to the tongue of serpent fire that’s always

taking the bloom off the candles with their noses pressed

against the window waiting for someone they know well enough

will never come, but have grown accustomed to the absence,

and I’ll sing my heart out like the deathsong of a circumpolar dragon

on the ledge of a high precipice only the truest of lovers

have ever jumped from, scattering the ashes of their shining

on the wind to sow the emptiness with the stars and fireflies

of transmorphic constellations with more than one myth of origin.

I’m sure I’m living someone else’s solitude. What

a palatial abyss! What a hovel this is! Is there

a return address above the door? Does anyone live here

anymore? Am I the only one home? Am I

lingering in the doorway of a pathetic exit

or a grand entrance? Either way I’m lost. I end

where I began, midnight sun, new moon, Venutian Lucifer

under the eyelid of false dawn that turns me on and off

like the lightswitch of a wildflower looking for enlightenment

in the dark heart of a total eclipse that blows the candles out

so it can get a quick glimpse of what it’s waiting for.

Celestial tears of mystic chandeliers aren’t going to water

my roots deeply embedded in star mud or put out

this underground fire that seethes with life

independently of the light like a volcano in the caldera

of an oracular seabed where the dead remind the living

life’s always been more a matter of going to extremes, like breathing,

than hugging shore like a broken mirror clinging to what it reflects,

the white feather of the moon and the nightsea’s tidal regrets.

The truth isn’t sculpted out of Carrara marble like Judaic David

in a body cast with a broken arm Brunelleschi will later sew back on

once Florence isn’t Republican anymore. It’s a cave

that’s always been sand-blasted by upper class hourglasses

of gentrifying lies trying to scrub the meat-eating smell

of the Neanderthals off the walls of their hunting magic

expressed in carbon and red ochre like the secret syllables

for blood and night, to make the place more habitable

for vacationing gazelles with more time on their hands than predators.

The lesser of two lies is still pinging the short straw

on the tine of a tuning fork that bites like a snake

in the middle of a dancefloor where the roses waltz with thorns

to keep their finger on the pulse of a dead cultural life

that makes perfect sense to the unimaginative.

All the white knights have floated away like ice floes and snowmen

that couldn’t take the heat when ice came to fire

as an alternative way of destroying the dragons of the earth

and wept away what little time they had left.

I’ve never been betrayed by anyone or anything

I didn’t believe in first. I’ve cherished the worst with sly ideals.

I once thought I heard the mermaids singing to me

but it was just a pod of killerwhales disciplined by trained seals

to hit the high notes like flying fish out of their depths.

When the glass grows too dark like soot

on the third eye of an imperfectly burning lamp to see

the fireflies and stars deep within, lay the full moon

like a penny on the eyelid of your telescope,

kiss it on the forehead and wish it better dreams next time

than the nightmares it focused on in this life.

Go out to the woods late at night under the early spring stars

and from the bottom of your solitude, without

seeking an answer, speak to the ferocious clarity

of their indifference like a madman drowning in his own eyes.

PATRICK WHITE

THE GREAT SPRING NIGHT PIVOTS LIKE A PRAYERWHEEL

THE GREAT SPRING NIGHT PIVOTS LIKE A PRAYERWHEEL

The great spring night pivots like a prayerwheel

on the inconsequential circumstances and events

of an unforeseen order of chaos that doesn’t give many hints

of what’s to come. The larval nymphs of hibernial dreams,

sleepwalking through the soporific winter, comatose as snow

are stripping off their eras of clothing like space-suits

and drying their wings like stained glass straight out of the kiln

adapting to the new medium like an open window

breaking up like a miscarriage of ice in desolate bays north of here.

A pregnant pause in the air. The premature hilarity

of late revellers liberating hot tears of alcohol

on the grey acreage of the X-rated pavement down below,

where unknown movie stars write their names in wet cement.

This is the phoney war, the sitzkrieg, the false dawn of Armageddon.

The snapping turtles keep their helmets on.

Felonious spirits man the nightwatch like roosting crows.

The nemetic depths have had enough of superficial catastrophes

crying wolf every time some celebrated non entity

breaks another painted fingernail like the last crescent of the moon

just to flaunt the waning mutability of the law

as Caligula makes his horse a senator

at a see through toga party for transparent government

throwing acid in the eyes of the oracles who can see lightyears beyond

the pernicious longevity of their corporate gene pools.

The moguls, ghouls, and mutants of neo feudalism

crusading like iron chastity belts against birth control

in the lobbies of brothel hotels and banks with the room service

of slummy hospitals and debtor’s prisons for the poor.

Everybody knows they’re swimming through stone

in the cement galoshes of Al Capone as the gangsters

run for office to be of future use to their own careers.

The apple bloom of the human spirit is remedially cankered.

The northern lights that no one has ever lifted like the veils of Isis

are the delirious fever of a solar infection breaking out in sunspots

like mold on an orange. Say it isn’t so, Joe, say it isn’t so.

Yesterday’s grailquest to heal the ailing kingdom

is the dark labyrinth of today’s video game

stockpiling weapons against the expressionless zombies

of the walking dead hiding behind the coffin lids

of their homeless graves like slow-witted assassins

trying to ambush Seal Team 6 like an unemployable working class.

At this preeminent hour the street is lined with eyeless windows

into the human soul downloading an app to livestream its dreams

in high definition like a Caravaggio painting that invites you

to stick your finger in the bullet holes like a doubting Thomas

the wound in Christ’s side chalk-marked like gore on the sidewalk.

Someone’s overturning the gravestones of the angels

that kept their ancient places like a Confederate cemetery.

The barons in their hill forts look down from their overviews

surveying all they own like paranoid pleonaxiacs covetous

of their neighbour’s need to eat and live and breathe and breed

in peace as if he had a birthright to his own regeneration,

one anonymous stem cell of a creative imagination

that all else follows from of its own accord like dragonflies

and leaves on the fourth growth trees and pariahed waters of life.

The dark is supersaturated with the indolent intemperance

of vulpine rabies about to go pandemic in a hydrophobic rage

of anti-biospheric spirit enflamed by a vindictive madness

that will afflict itself on people like King Omega of the Waning Year

on a terminal ward where desolation just wants to get it over with.

Didn’t the poet say, enough, or too much? Desecration

on a crime spree against the laws of hospitality

toward strangers from the past, rape a Brazilian bus.

The stars above the yellow riverside willows coming into leaf

shine more simplistically as the subtlety of our seeing

is dumbed down by the political conditioning of watchers

watching the watchers as they hand out bread and circuses

at a black mass of wafers and viviparous passions

where every contestant regresses through the stations of virtual reality

like an anti Eleusinian mystery play based on classical mycology.

Little tree, little tree, in the Eden we can’t return to,

you’re a soft-hearted thornapple cooler than moonlight

flaking like the flesh of silver fish on a thriving lake

where water preoccupies itself with being alive.

The wisdom of the return journey’s deeper innocence

has been irrevocably lost like the peduncle

in the ensuing phylum, like an empty lifeboat

that drifted away in the fog of an unmoored moment.

The morphology of knowledge forms comes and goes

like a shapeshifter annihilating positrons

looking for God particles to attribute mass

to a Standard Model of Universal Mirages

that can be photo-shopped like a proxy of God to posterity.

Save me, save me from myself cry the chicken little prophets

who keep falling on themselves like skies caving in

to the pressure of laying enough cosmic eggs to meet

a minimum quota of sunny days to come inside.

Power, knowledge, wealth, sex, art, popularity,

Californian encounters with astonishing gods,

as serial killers return the keys to the broken washrooms

abused at roadside gas stations by people passing through

their own digestive tracts, one acidic pit stop after another,

as the wolves dig up teenage girls along the Highway of Tears in B.C.

with cyanotically blue fingernails and mass i.d.

that salves the horror of random killing with an air

of inevitability, given what some of them did for a living,

making love because they couldn’t afford to make war.

The healers are coming up with new placebos all the time

to keep up with the progress of advanced diseases of the mind

The death of so many children fingerpainting in their own blood,

a serious threat to gun rights. Boards of education,

the Praetorian guard. Day care centers at the OK corral.

A run on boomslangs and Bushmasters like Apple i pods,

while everyone sighs trying to milk the moon of human kindness

for anti-venom to undo the paralysis of a child’s mass cardiac arrest.

We’ve been shocked to death by the ferocity

of our own sins of omission trying to put a cold smile on things

like snow on a dungheap, flowers and teddy bears

on the stairs of an abattoir that puts hell with its halberds to shame.

The big fish eat the little fish and the little fish have to be armed.

Evolution is an arms race that can trace its ancestral lifelines

like a bush back to the Burgess Shale. Predatory eyes.

Soft body parts like bleeding hearts in thicker shells.

Heat seekers and siege minds with the internet wired

to their skulls like drone masters in Colorado

with their eye in the sky on the big picture

of draconian starmaps placing their zodiacs

under house arrest in zoological environments

to preserve them from going extinct before they’re questioned.

O Truman, little haberdasher, you let Pandora out of the box

like a nuclear foreign policy that turned the elemental table

against itself like a mad dog biting at its own ulcerations.

Phaeton took charge of the chariot of the sun and set fire to the earth.

Shall we take the reins of Charles’ Wain in the bread basket

of the Midwest and plough the dead under like grain

to renew the half lives of a genetically modified rebirth

as resistant to blight as Jesus in the wilderness harrowing hell

as we reverse the spin on our millenarian myths of origin

and make agriculture the civilized scapegoat for what we cultivate

in our missile siloes? Cain slew Able because his sacrifice

wasn’t acceptable and the crow scratched the earth

like a corporate farmer and said bury him here like this.

Isn’t it true? Now every time we kill a plant

we’re hunting ourselves to death like food?

Greed raised the temperature of the earth five degrees

when the planet came down with us like a fever

and Atlantis sank like an oil platform in the North Sea

all technologically failsafe sailors on board

like true captains of industry manning their executive lifeboats

while we’re left clinging like swim bladders

well over our heads in debt to anything that floats.

Apocalyptic. Martin Sheen on acid in the first scene.

Violent mandalas freaking our punched-out reflections

like spider webs having a nervous breakdown

someone might lift the veil from our face

and see once and for all what we’ve always been,

gravitational eyes shapeshifting empty space

as if, as it never isn’t, I were modelling my inspiration, my muse

into a full body life study in the nude from the inside out

and she had to stand very still in the rain,

in a thin garment of silence, just as I’m about

to say her name like a grave at the back of an orphanage.

PATRICK WHITE