LOOKING FOR AN ORBIT IN THE RIPPLES OF RAIN AT MIDNIGHT

LOOKING FOR AN ORBIT IN THE RIPPLES OF RAIN AT MIDNIGHT

Looking for an orbit in the ripples of rain at midnight

like a rogue planet that doesn’t belong anywhere.

I enter this page like a tent city in my homelessness

without self-pity, a vagantes wandering in exile

having cast myself out like an ostrakon of one

when my heart shattered like an urn full of ashen insights

into my own insignificance as an ageing dragon among the stars.

Scars, scars, scars, the cuneiform of my flesh

trying to translate itself into the linear A of my mother-tongue.

I don’t pair well with women who aren’t as self-forsaken as I am,

though I’ve tried, though I really did love the effort they put into me

and how I was moved to see the eclipse of God

through their eyes darkly so I didn’t go blind

in the mountains of the moon no prophet has ever climbed

without a warning not to look directly into the sun.

As I’ve said somewhere before I can’t remember

my tongue is a leaf on the wind, my eyes are clouds

in a sky that absorbs me like the vapour of a contrail at dusk.

Ghosts of hindsight, no wiser than the man who lived them once,

I mistrust the wisdom I derive from them at these

lonely seances of the heart like an expiry date

on all I’ve ever aspired to in the name of love and poetry.

A great fool, I risked it all, knowing what I was doomed to lose.

My sincerity knew no bounds. My intensity made

the sidereal ore of my Canadian immensity weep starwheat

into ploughshares that laboured to harvest

the mistletoe of the moon as if I had to cut off

my own balls with the golden sickle of my last crescent

like the King of the Waxing Year to keep my imagination fertile

and the siloes full of the dark abundance I reaped

like a reward for the lightyears of bright vacancy

I had to endure like Spica in Virgo at the autumn equinox

before the days got shorter, and the long, cold nights

doled out short straws at the foodbanks for the blind

that wintered in my mind like star-nosed moles

that shone underground like the light at the end of a tunnel.

I raised a black sail like a new moon among

the startled angels fleets that scattered

like the phases of apple bloom on a brisk wind

that blew them out to sea like a deepening awareness

of how transitory even the most beautiful are

running before the storm like butterflies

over the flatlining event horizons

of the black holes I warned them away from

like the skull and crossbones of a poem on a headstone

I dedicated to them like a bride catalogue

of transfigurative unions, alloys of paradisaical hells.

Moonboats and bottles of wine, tokes, guitars, poems

and paintings, existential sex, tomorrow with a no exit sign,

fame a passing acquaintance of mine, I threw my heart

back into the fire time and time again. I ate

the blistered grapes of vinegar that soured

the still-life depressions that censored my subversive silence

like a cut flower on a chequered table cloth

next to the long stem knife in an operating theatre

where I stitched the wounded roses of my miraculous passions

up with their own thorns to make something holy

out of nothing. Holy, holy, holy, the archival dust

of love affairs heaped like the Library of Alexandria

to keep the fire burning in the cracked heartwood

I threw on the flames like a heretical gesture of forever.

Not good times, no, never what anyone would ever ask for,

no winterized cottages with organic orchards at the end

of a country lane, but whole and crazy, resonant

with meaningless significance at the time, no intercessors

between me and my emotions like second thoughts

before I jumped like a skydiving dandelion toward paradise,

encouraged by my failures to find a place to land

to try, try again like the little train that could or a bird

meditating in the third eye of a hurricane like a shelter

for the homelessness of the words I turned out like muses

on the streetcorners of the wellsprings and literary watering holes

of binging poets trying to get it all in before last call

when they turned the eye-burning gaudiness of the light on again

and the proprietors of profitable mundanity who thrived

as our vices flourished, said in unison like a choir of cowbells

haven’t you got a home to go to, knowing quite well, the answer

was invariably no. Not in the way you imagine four walls.

PATRICK WHITE

LIFE IS AN ORDER OF CHAOS INTERACTING WITH ITSELF

LIFE IS AN ORDER OF CHAOS INTERACTING WITH ITSELF

Life is an order of chaos interacting with itself.

Look at how much awareness has to take for granted

as if the body were the patron of the mind

to have the time to think of what I’ve just said.

On our own we’re wavelengths unravelling

like loose threads in a flying carpet that waxes and wanes

like the phases of a watersnake on the moon

that lays its light down like an undulant sword in tribute to the lake

that receives it like the hour hand of a many-headed clepshydra.

Together we make particles of ourselves.

We’re a compilation of perimeters we’re always

violating like boundary stones in an asteroid belt

in order to grow out of the visions and skins

that restrain us in this world of forms

like the normative straitjackets of ill-defined things.

Dictions change, the slang, the patois, the demotic,

the dream grammars in the abyss of little deaths

we experience as sleep that makes us visionary illiterates

on the scaffoldings of dark matter we climb up on

to paint an image of what we can see of ourselves in passing

of a world we keep failing to live in in order to survive

our own insights without losing our minds with

nothing to show for it but the mystery of why we couldn’t.

And the timing of our ignorance is as crucial and enlightening

as a recidivistic dawn that blinds us with its blazing

by rephrasing the aniconic lyrics of the birds that sing to it.

Everyone frames their shadow and nails it to the wall

like a degree that measures the expertise they have

in the discontinuous history of themselves

or the future memories of prophetic mirages

irrigating the deserts sands of an hourglass that never floods

or greens the harvests they thrive upon like a death wish

for something more than life as they know it to grow beyond.

Last night I was brave enough to remove the face

my death mask was wearing like a hidden secret

I wanted to keep to myself. Tonight I’m laying

my hands on my heart like a faith healer

without the courage to sacrifice the gods to it

like a cure all for what ails my human divinity.

No honour among thieves, no truth among frauds

to make their lies feel real against the odds they might be.

Auspicious constellations reveal the ambiguity

of my metaphoric initiations into the clarity

of my quantum entanglements in the mystery of a life

that recognizes me indifferently in the signs of what

I’m becoming liberated from like everything I’ve ever known

or second-guessed about the waywardness of my seeking self

never so much at home in the world as when I’m lost.

PATRICK WHITE

THE TOWN DEAD BY MIDNIGHT

THE TOWN DEAD BY MIDNIGHT

The town dead by midnight, dark spring rain on the streets

like puddles of anthracite, the cat asleep in its feral innocence

and the furnace pipes cracking like arthritic bones

and there’s a bleakness that’s trying to speak for me

like a train whistle with a muse of its own. Words

are trying to understand me like a silence that sings

with a surrealistic accent in a stanza of migratory water birds

excluded from the aubades and aviaries of the dawn

because they don’t make cliches of the lakes they return to

to swim among the stars like constellations of themselves.

Sheltered from the adolescent temper of the wind

in the tolerable loneliness of my apartment, this bone-box

I write in the fair hand of a cursive script of smoke,

of rivers flooding their banks alluvially

with the emotional silts of a spring run off

that lavishes me on the roots of half-drowned trees,

I disembark like a lifeboat from a Viking funeral ship

and let my mind drift into the depths of an insignificant abyss

that’s never tasted the meaning in the flavour of death

or cared that much for the black humour of what I believe in

that labours at keeping me alive. If I knew why it should

I could only be a disappointment to the future

of my undiscovered solitude actualizing its creative potential

to enter into occult marriages with muses that sweep me off my feet

like stars and leaves off the stairwells of my deciduous arrivals.

I don’t petition the gods or summon the ghosts

of fires that burnt out yesterday like votive daylilies

in the aniconic shrines of the sun to return from the dead

and bless what I plead for as if I knew what to ask

from my sorrow that might help tomorrow rejoice

in what’s to come. Even wisdom doesn’t question

the nature of the song that emerges from the night

like a wild canary in a coal mine urgent as a pilot light

that smells apocalyptic gas in the subterranean labyrinths

of star-nosed moles blindly seeking to get at the roots of things

that only bloom in the dark underworlds of our radicalized starmud.

Bleak outside. Death, death, death in the dead air

of artless cement and chronic pageant of storefronts

like the repeating decimals of unappealing floats

in a municipal parade of all we’ve got to celebrate.

I don’t want to feel bleak inside, sickened by the world,

but Walmart is dyeing its fashion garments in the blood

of Bangladeshi girls skinned of their lives

by corporate traplines and parasitic politicians

baiting humans with 14 cents an hour seven days a week

like those wasps that lay their eggs like carnelian dots

on the foreheads of the living host to let their young devour it

like future consumers of the western world baptized

with brand names. Maybe I should meditate upon a flower

like the one Buddha gave Ananda with a knowing smile,

but all I see are white peonies freaked with the hemoglobin of children.

In my time, people with clean hands were usually the filthiest.

We were clever but we weren’t encouraged to be real.

We stuck to the unprincipled indifference of our social structures

like flypaper. We danced on the graves of our fellow humans

and promoted a trickle down theory of happiness like global warming.

Our weapons evolved like insects, but the abstract savagery

and rabid rage that deployed them were definitely

creationist, ante-diluvian, conservative, and simian. Nothing’s changed

since the first prehensile grip threw a bone ballistically

at the left front parietal lobe of another ape whose ideas

mythically deflated its brain. In back rooms

and sensorily deprived think tanks of lobbyists and spin-doctors

we made window dressing of democracy in the showcase windows

where we displayed the latest wardrobes like the death shrouds

of the humans our gluttony had culled. Misery polluted

the chandeliers of our crystal tears like a hemorrhagic fever of acid rain,

but we went on ghost dancing with ourselves as if things

would get better and better without realizing we were already dead.

Evil in the world. If you care, how can you not go mad?

If you don’t care, how can you not be peacefully complicit

in what it is by virtue of a sin of omission, forgetting

it will rush in like a backdraft of a fire through your door one day

because nature abhors a vacuum and paralysis and impotence

incite it like blood in the water, mice in a snakepit?

Atrocities perpetrated in the name of order are worse

than random accidents of chaos that hold nothing personal

against us being here without necessity or purpose

sussing out our feeble meanings for life like garden snails

bull-vaulting our own horns trying not to get gored on the moon

like a prehistoric aurex that went extinct before we did.

I should leave all these catastrophes behind me like

a graceful exit I made at the bend of an awkward entrance

and walk out into the darkness beyond this catwalk of streetlamps

posing like tungsten asphodels observing a moment of silence

with their heads bowed like cobras into the woods

down by the river but I’m loathe to track myself in like roadkill.

I want to walk ankle-deep in the starmud of the wolf paths

that will be thawing out this time of year before the rain

has had a chance to pack them down solid again or plump

the grass of the deerbeds. I just want to see one star

shining through the burgeoning branches in the burgundy crowns

of the birches putting their green gowns on again like renewable virgins.

Beauty coming out of the darkness like Spica in Virgo.

Trout lily, hepatica, wood sorrel, violet and crocus,

I want to see what colours the spring has on its palette this year.

I want to experience a pink full moon soon to be eclipsed in Scorpio

and expand the difference that makes to the way I understand things.

I want to know whose blood is coagulated on the candelabra

of the staghorn sumac leaning out over the river

like an old torch singer at a black mass beginning

to get her voice back as she feathers her reflection like a phoenix.

PATRICK WHITE

FIREFLIES FLASHING LIKE A SEANCE OF MEMORIES

FIREFLIES FLASHING LIKE A SEANCE OF MEMORIES

Fireflies flashing like a seance of memories

out of the low-lying fog of the past,

extemporal images that took me to heart

a long time ago, friends, lovers, children,

faces I cherished and could not live without,

gone from the bough like birds and blossoms.

I still feel this dark serpent energy coiled

in the marrow of my bones like the spring

of a ball point pen miscarrying in my pocket,

but the wavelengths are getting longer,

red-shifting toward the west into more

compliant sunsets than the youthful Armageddons

that confirmed my faith in looking for panaceas

and cure-alls in the heart of self-destruction

like particles of God in fissionable visions of creation.

Is this my half-life, uranium 239 stabilizing

into lead like a child’s sparkler returning

to the burnt out ores of some radiant conception

of what life and love, poetry and mind were,

meanings that elude me now in the vastness

under my homing wings, a crow in the dusk,

the crumb of a dream in the corner of a third eye

that sits atop my prophetic skull like the cupola

of an empty observatory half-closed in sleep like a cat?

I didn’t abandon the oceanic cosmologies

I shed along the way like skin so much as outgrow them

like rivers I’d floated down before all the way to the sea

where things get blurred and vaporous as desperate terminologies

trying to give a name to the nameless. The time

I wasted in the world’s eyes like a waterclock

of wishing wells trying to saddle-stitch my insights

like starmaps of the constellations of my age

that stare at me now like a blank page of silence and light

into the mindstream of what I am flowing through alive

urgent as an empty lifeboat drifting on a nightsea to know

where I come from and where I’m going

before I’m gone where I come from as if

in the depths of my eyeless seeing, I’d find a being

as blissful and sweet as the man I second-guessed my way

into wanting to be, writing in the shadows of the apple bloom

that crept across the morning grass like a beatific farewell

to things that can’t last longer than a specious moment before they pass.

I watch the stars that used to follow me through the woods

settle on my windowsill like dust and and the cinders

of exhausted houseflies. And even in this, there’s

something intriguing and strange like hidden jewels

in the slag of mined-out starmaps, that it should be this way

and not another, that it should be at all, and I be here

in the presence of my metaphoric awareness seeking

what can’t be sought like the sign of a flawless mind

in what befalls us from the inside out like chaos

embodied in the creative potential of time in the unlikeliness of us.

Nothing to weep over. No reason to indulge the heart

in a silence it can’t afford. Or sublimate your eyes

like dry ice in an isolated Martian mindscape alone at night

watching Deimos and Phobos, fear and terror,

eclipse your field of view with the cybernetic optics

of an Arctic labcoat looking for signs of life in a dustpan

of fossilized pollen. Like the queen’s clothes,

the sartorial flowers of life never bloom twice in a lifetime.

PATRICK WHITE

MY THIRD EYE OPENING OCEANICALLY OF ITS OWN ACCORD

MY THIRD EYE OPENING OCEANICALLY OF ITS OWN ACCORD

My third eye opening oceanically of its own accord.

The wingspans of the flowers bloom omnidirectionally.

The blue sky lays a balmy smile upon my flightfeathers.

Blood hums to the blissful resonance of being alive.

Even the glowing concrete seems benign. The gates

with their rusting guns triggered like locks, the fences

holding the occupying gardens with their placard poppies

back like riot cops. Time without haste. Consumed

by a moment as perennial as summer on earth.

Nothing urgent in the fulfilment of small destinies

in the grass, no antecedents necessary to know

how to live this, no event trivial or especially significant,

I’m as open-minded as the wind on a shoreless afternoon

that tastes of the stars gusting in the dust at my feet.

Wild parsnip, Queen Ann’s Lace, mullein, goldenrod,

purple loosetrife and cattails in the ditches along the roads,

Lichens of the moon on the staves of the cedar rails

where the red-winged blackbirds sit

to paint their picture-music on the unprimed air

like the musical notes of a cadmium red and yellow song

with overriding tones of nocturnes to come.

Sweetness of life when it takes its mind off of everything

and requires nothing of the living but attendance.

Just to be here like a vagrant wavelength of awareness

among things as they are without trying

to gouge your eyes out like bluejays at the sunflowers

to get at the roots of the flowering mind deep in the heart

of the hidden harmonies basking on the surface

they’re joy riding like the elegant riffs

of the dolphins and flying fish that leap out of the shadows

into the enraptured atmosphere of their own auras

like blue damselflies and green tree frogs and old guitars

working their necks like weavers, or fleet-footed spiders

walking on water like heavy metal on a Ouija board,

like thorns in the eye of a bubble, hoping it doesn’t

wash them out like tears in the eyes of a voodoo doll

looking through the keyhole of a needle it couldn’t find

like paradise on the other side of its blind blessing.

Not for long or far, I’m still walking a habitable planet

full of wonders. Though the road keeps getting shorter

like a fuse behind me the further I travel down it,

and the asteroids keep making newsbreaking fly-bys,

and there are rosaries of bubbling methane rising

from under the shrinking skull caps of the poles,

and people are still trying to keep each other’s attention

by stabbing one another in the eye, but for a moment

that isn’t concerned about whether anything lasts or not,

there are no omens stuck in the throats of the rocks,

or blood of children splashed on the hollyhocks. A re-run

of provisional innocence in a few hundred acres of woodland

swept under the rugs of abandoned farms as not worth the trouble.

Lapwing gates hanging by a hinge to distract

the wild grapevines away from her empty nest

as if it still cherished its emptiness out of a force of habit.

I look upon the Tay River at sunset, the reflection

of the darkening hill quivering in the cooling breeze

like the more mercurial downside of itself,

and the sky opening the blue-green eyes of the peacocks

like stars with too much make-up on, and a handful

of charred crows flying through the roots of the trees,

trying to make sense of themselves like a burnt manuscript.

And what can you say to the stars that are beginning

to look for themselves in the approaching night

except this too is the world where even the lost,

in attempting to return to themselves through

the unattainability of the past, shed light all along the way?

Nightfall and the silence intensifies the conversation

with bioluminous insights of the radiance

blazing out of the darkness of a white coma

as if it depended upon the contrast oxymoronically

just to be noticed like waterlilies in the shallows

of the conscious mind anchored by a spinal cord

to the reptilian epodes of its own illustrious starmud

as every thought moment is, like kelp and kites

and river reeds swaying like synchronized swimmers

to the currents and wavelengths, the turns

and counterturns, of thematic waters with a musical motif

that plays to its own depths from the bridge

of a burning violin dancing like fire on the water

with no fear of ever being drowned out by the moon.

PATRICK WHITE

SOMETHING CONTINENTAL WITHIN ME RISING

SOMETHING CONTINENTAL WITHIN ME RISING

Something continental within me rising.

Atlantis, surfacing. Pangaea coming back together,

synarthritically, after diversifying its sentient life forms,

from the preludes of the Burgess Shale

to the double-beamed diplodeci of Patagonia.

I can feel the shoulders of an ancient ocean

heaving up beneath me like a Leviathan of life

with the power to smash headlong through

the hull of the lifeboat of my psyche, or tip me

like a seal off this last ice floe I’m clinging to in the Arctic

with four polar bears, Henry Hudson, and a terrified tern.

Sublimely underwhelmed, everything I once transcended

crossing a burning bridge of stars in a long firewalk

now subtended like the underside of a leaf or a starmap

as if my vision of life, and this thread of blood,

this small mindstream at night I am in it, is being

woven and unravelled by the moon I’m giving birth to

in a fire womb of an underwater fumarole

umbilically connected to the magmatic core of the earth,

hydrogen sulphide mythically inflating the scale of life.

I’m heading into a bloodstorm with a ragged poem

like a flag of surrender for a sail on a life raft I lashed together

from the available driftwood that washed up on my shores

like the contorted corpses of those who had drowned in agony,

trying, as I have, for light years, to get to the other side before I die

in this tidal pool of shore-hugging ego that esteems itself

the third eye of the great nightsea beyond it

and when it’s full of stars, the parabolic mirror

of a reflecting telescope in orbit around itself like a deer fly.

The earth is turning into quicksand under my feet.

O, earth, gape! A touch Marlovian, perhaps,

and a sound magician might make a demi-god,

but demi-gods don’t always make the most sound magicians.

My skyscrapers are loosing their footing

like needles skipping grooves across an old fashioned record

of the celestial spheres, striated by retreating glaciers

trying to revive the last word of their literary careers,

like fireflies with enfibulators come to jump start their art

too late, too late, to go south with the other birds.

The mourning dove flees, but the crow winters with its heart

like a continent of coal deep freezing into diamonds

when a dark muse seizes it by the throat like an eclipse

and it cries out in the starless night of the uncomprehending abyss

across the ice-glazed eyelids of the blood-stained snows,

I am the ocean in the eye of a black rose.

I am the prophetic passion of fire in the skull of a dragon.

I am the dark lantern the arks of the stars

send out before themselves as if their myths of origin

were all ahead of them like a time capsule of eyes

to be opened sometime in the future when the light

makes land fall like the Norse at L’anse aux Meadows

before the fishermen anglicized Medusa from the French

in Jelly Fish Cove at the northern tip of Newfoundland.

I am the spectral blazing of the silver heart of the moon.

I am the compassionate ice palace of an Inuit embassy,

an igloo in tears, giving sanctuary to the snow blind ghosts

that can wander the tundra for years like exiled dolmens

following the spectral fires of the auroral borealis

without any sign of a seance rising like smoke

from more accommodating fires on the shamanic horizon

of a mystic trickster that ate the eyes of the snow fox

so it could see in the dark the traps that had been laid for it.

Long before I became the funereal usher

greeting the new comers at the one-way exits of the dead,

I was the gateless gate at the entrance of the living

to the longest white nights of their lives in a northern paradise

where nothing was forbidden and the great oracular snake

that Blake said in his prophetic books would arise in Canada

found it too cold to survive and perished

like a wavelength of dark energy red shifted toward the light

in a six month long nightmare no fire could revive it from

like the hallucinogenic smelling salts of the volcano

it coiled around for visionary warmth at Delphi.

But I can tell by the tattoos on the skin it shed

what it would have said if it had been more adaptable

and let more serpent fire go to its head in this cold climate

like chimney sparks among the stars

shining above its last chakra circumpolarly like Draco

growing wings like a wivern of wild grape vines

wrapped around the axis mundi of the wounded earth.

I can heal. I can soothe. I can seduce you to my love.

I can move like a scar over the surface of the earth.

I can run like a wild northern river roiling in the moonlight

I can linger like a ripple in the oilslick of the Alberta tar sands,

or a perma frost speed bump on an asphalt highway in the spring.

I can be the dark angel in your way who drives

a spear of light through your heart so you can

never really tell if you’re just another Barbie

toying with nirvana, or a real voodoo doll in the night

with a deeper insight into the dark arts of cursing and blessing

than either of the shallower mirrors and scenic vistas

of your blood and tears could have managed

on the same event horizon where they stand on the threshold

of a black hole they dare not enter on their own.

I am the alpha. I am the omega of shapeshifters

I am a dynamic equilibrium of fire and water

at peace with themselves without compromising

the other’s nature for rising up or flowing down.

When my feet are in the stars, my head is on the ground.

I am the balancing act of a sacred clown

chequered like a chessboard calendar

of the days and nights of my life

I’ve danced with the full,

I’ve danced with the new moons

as if my ends always came before my beginnings.

Extinction the prelude of inception,

not the false dawn of its epilogue.

Clarity doesn’t engender an opposite.

It isn’t reality. It isn’t a lack of deception.

It just means enlightenment and delusion

have both ceased to exist

as you make your exit, laughing,

with a real tear painted on your cheek that hasn’t dried yet.

PATRICK WHITE

PARANOIA KILLS LIKE A FANATIC WHAT IT SUSPECTS WITHOUT CONVICTION

PARANOIA KILLS LIKE A FANATIC WHAT IT SUSPECTS WITHOUT CONVICTION

Paranoia kills like a fanatic what it suspects without conviction

isn’t true about what it believes about thinking. It’s getting

mad out here, the moon’s gone rabid and the tides are awry.

Given my age and the quality of my rage tempered

like the sword I fell upon in the waters of life

more evolutionary than the revolution that dropped out

to go back to Daddy’s law school like one of the fashionistas

of idealism who’d rather be wealthy and wonderful than real,

I scry the future behind me in Dr. John Dee’s black mirror,

menace in the air, darkness growing like black mold

in the walls of the house of life, the garotte tightening

around the necks of those who stick out like deathbed confessions

that there are still things worth dying for that make you feel

you’ve wasted your life, given how little has changed.

The bees are estranged from the flowers by neonicotinoids

that go out of their way like pesticides to kill anything

anyone loves anymore, if that’s still credibly possible.

I stare personally into the blank, oblivion of the door

that’s opening up ahead like the threshold of a return address

and I think to myself, every groundhog’s got two holes

to escape by and I can see an eyeless night at the end

of the tunnel of death littered with the corpses of star-nosed moles

that died like molecules for nothing when the light

went looking for their eyes like a convenient disguise

for seeing nothing, hearing nothing, knowing nothing,

the old stars in front of the aimless firing squads of the fireflies,

terrorists in sleeper cells of waterboarded nightmares

with mini-black holes in their hearts you can enter

like a bullet through the brain and leave by an exit-wound

through the mouth of God as the spin doctors infringe

on her copyright, factualizing the fictions, and fictionalizing

the facts like a twenty-four hour news cycle

that teaches you there’s nothing personal in the way

you can’t help but hate your fellow man as if

the only thing that bonded us to one another anymore

on this chromosomatic coil of flypaper were the buzzing

of our anger and disgust at getting stuck without an alibi

for who we are as we plea deal for brain resistant headstones

we can hide under for the duration like cut worms in our roots.

I want to trust. I want to love. I want to seek. I want

to listen to what others speak as if we shared the same silence.

I don’t want to read any more statistics about

the collateral damage of our pandemic neglect.

Twenty-five million children, give a few of them

faces and fingertips in your mind, blood your abstractions

and see your own kids in your mind with the same

quizzical look of disappointed surprise in their

blue, black, green, brown, trusting eyes when they realize

they’ve lived just long enough to be killed by the lies

the elect of the world tell like bedtime stories to landmines

and political screening myths proclaiming they were victimized

by the lack of happy endings for bad seeds who don’t believe

in the same genetically modified creeds of wheat

it’s become a violation of an industrial patent on our cells

to break with each other meiotically once and awhile

as if we really meant bread and medicine when we said

hunger and disease, tired of our guilt spoiling the health

of our featherless chickens born ready for processing

as if the hogs had found a way of shortening the food chain

like a rosary of pearls thrown like loaves and fishes into the trough.

I want to look out over the valley of life as I’m leaving it

like dusk over the shoulder of a mountain I climbed

to get closer to the stars without going blind like people

who look into the face of God and think they recognize themselves.

It may be retrograde on my part to want to celebrate

in an age of desecration, but there’s a beatific demon

of crazy wisdom within me that says do, dance, sing,

whether you have a reason to or not, embrace the absurdity

of dancing with the cloud shadows on the darkening hilltops

against the gathering storm of a clockwork apocalypse

on the nightshift of a graveyard where the stars go to die

because they can’t live on the mean skies that make them feel

like mere satellites of the visionary fingerpaintings

we smear on our narrowing eyes like the aperture of a Cyclops.

Even if you have to sing like a soft metal alloy in a language

twisted by the mutated sensibilities of the times as

the cherry bloom cankers its perfection at Chernobyl and Fukushima

as the first sign of the fallout of a drastic spring.

Sing about anything as if there were a muse of chaos

lodged in your heart like a cardinal in an evergreen

that took over your house like a riot of homeless guests.

Dirge, dorn, whimper like a deermouse that believes

it’s got Lime disease, put your hands over your ears

like a hood over the head of a red-tailed hawk

and shriek at the sky like fingernails clawing a blackboard

if you must, but find a way to go insane

that lets you sing in the asylum to yourself

sitting by the window in the artificial light of a false dawn

with an irrefutable smile on your face you don’t need to wipe off

like a mirror that’s getting ready to take your place in the universe.

Right here and even now where it’s imminently conceivable

things will get worse and worse and worse and worse

and the dead will legislate for the living myths of origin

only the stillborn of the imagination will subscribe to,

and the dispossessed alienated by a deathmask

that slowly effaces them like a farcical masquerade

of the lives they pretend to be living for the sake of appearances

will cultivate exotic norms of madness that will conform

to the unconscionable scions of chaos living like

the mountainous echo of a moral code that couldn’t restrain them

deep within where apocalypse originates not as fire or ice

but the afterbirth of a forbidden silence that never shows its face.

Even in the midst of this, Loki, a sacred clown,

a downcast harlequin with long fingers sitting disconsolately

on a beach ball as the circus packs up to move on,

a trickster crow, a dark farce of your dynastic selves

in a long hall of mirrors warped by the gravitational lies

you have to vow to the dark every night to ground the shapeshifter

you’ve become in your absence in the starmud

of your next astronomical catastrophe to keep

from taking your extinction personally, whatever,

whomever, whyever you have to do, make it the labour

of a capricious preference, if nothing else, to sing like a universe

to the genius of your solitude as if you were setting

a loveletter to your muse on fire to show her how

serious you are about passionately annihilating your inspiration

in the thousands of eyes she has shed like tears over the lightyears

to silver the mirrors that flow like the radiant rivers of the waters of life

from your improbable heart over the precipitous thresholds

of a homeless art that’s been on this mysterious road long enough

not to close the gate after it like an exit with nothing to look forward to.

PATRICK WHITE