SPOTS ON A PAINT RAG

SPOTS ON A PAINT RAG

Spots on a paint rag trying to figure out

if they’re part of a larger picture.

Daubs and smudges and smears of black and red.

Topographies of dry thick ridges of blue acrylic,

peach-coloured mesas bruised

by the encroaching violets of dusk in a painted desert.

Are these the wanna-be windows of life

who failed to achieve a whole and harmonious view

of what they’re doing here swiping off knives

thick with the gore of cadmium red,

cleaning off brushes that get to go out

on the field to caress and poke

stars and trees into being? Waterboys, not players.

I say the word, life, and I feel tonight like

the heaviness of a bell that’s supplanted my heart.

The right root, but the wrong blossom.

Even though I’d melt that bell

back down into raucous cannon

to defend the concept to my very last breath.

But tonight I’m tunnelling under the foundations

of the cornerstones of life to bring

the walls down on top of my head,

like an avalanche of prophetic skulls

to just get a peek inside the grand paradigm,

the white light of the gessoed underpainting.

The secret garden with low-hanging fruit

on easy street with the sacred whores of Babylon.

An existential sadness, deep as a death-wound,

as if I’d just been stabbed in the heart

by the hands of a clock that mistook me for an intruder,

undermines me from below, a pyramid built on quicksand.

As if all those who had drowned in life

like fish up over their gills in water

were swimming in the watershed of every tear

that almost makes it up over the top of the dam

I try to throw up like a manly front to what

I know I won’t be able to hold back for long.

And there go the villages in the flooded valley

I tried to live among like a neighbourly mountain

come to Muhammad on the way up and down.

It’s cold and lonely and the air is thin

at the peaks of experience, with only

a star and a cloud for company.

The hard diamond in the rough I used to be

has grown mushy over the years. Tears.

Imagine that. Warm, salt seas with undulant tides

of emotion coursing in and out,

the way we breathe, the way we live and die,

unite and separate, pour our shining

down an inexhaustible black hole

like Parthian gold into Crassus’ mouth

in the hope of efflorescing like the bird fountain

of a better world on the other side of hyperspace.

Armed with some decent human attitudes,

and a few that are wholly out of bounds,

no reason my mind can catalyse out of chaos

that I should feel the sorrows of the discarded colours

on a paint rag like the afterbirth of the universe

that’s gone on to greater things than road kill.

I feel the deep grief of widowed eclipses

and the creeping shame of sunspots

that were born into a maculate caste

of estranged birthmarks on the forehead of a lighthouse.

Space is warped like water by some unknown

disturbance in the pond. And I can’t discern from here

whether it’s a crack in the dam

or a birth sac ripe enough for its waters to break

and wash me out to sea like

the flotsam and jetsam of a shipwrecked lifeboat.

I hear the lilac whispering into blossom.

I see the starlings building their nests

in the corners of my third eye and the spiders

weaving mandalas between the witching wands

of the aspen saplings trying to transcend their roots.

Still, time seems studiously impersonal

and more matter-of-fact about suffering

than perhaps it really is. The mind is an artist.

Able to paint the worlds. As they say in Zen.

And I can see so clearly even through this cloud of unknowing

the kind of world I’d love to live in,

giving it my full assent in peace and contentment,

as long as I never lost the hunger that desires these things

and no one else had to live like a ratty old towel

abused as a paint rag by the shroud of Tourin.

Yet I can’t help feeling I’ve spent

my whole life trying to piece a lost constellation

back together again from leftover stars

that don’t have a clue what they’re shining amounts to.

In the stained, marked for life, castaway things of the world,

in the eyeless dreams of aborted inspirations,

in the twenty million dollars an hour we waste on war,

in the eyes of the twenty-five million children a year

who are starving to death globally in civilizations

based upon agriculture, I’m looking

for the trashed masterpiece of a paint rag

soaked in the blood of hemorrhaging roses

that might have parted our eyelids like the Red Sea

or a gallery on opening night to a vision

of what they might have done had they lived

to do things differently and their genius and beauty

not been squandered like blood for oil

or the waters of life learned to mingle more olaceously

with oil slicks in the womb of the dark mother

like an alternate medium of creative expression

that wasn’t shunned like the evil skin of a shedding rat snake.

There’s an expanding emptiness in my heart,

a vacuum nature abhors like a miscarriage

of what I hoped to wake up to the day after tomorrow

like the smile of an enigmatic Mona Lisa

that didn’t die in childbirth married to a banker.

What faces reside in a paint rag

I might have fallen in love with at first sight,

what mind, moon, sea, sky and landscapes

might have sat on my easel like windows in space

that might have shown me a way out of here

like the eye of a hurricane at the end of a telescope

that made things at a great distance appear

larger and more astronomically intimate than they seem

when no one’s trying to paint the other end of the lens

by wiping their glass slippers off on the grass

as if the princess just stepped into a mess of Hooker’s green.

Disoriented hues of colour blind rainbows, who knows

how many faces have been wiped off on a towel

with the big, sad, musing eyes of luminous gazelles?

How many cardinals nesting in red cedar trees

were wiped off the canvas like lipstick on the moon

when the sun went Puritan, midnight at noon,

and scourged the scarlet letter of the kissing stone

until nothing was left of humanity

but the purged shadows of an abstract divinity

that burned a hundred thousand women

foxed out like witch hunts in the seventeenth century

at the stake of a principle that stood up to the flames

like the backbone of a heretic

with a streak of Payne’s Grey in her nature

slashing at the orange sunset

with a painting knife in her hands

at those who resented the concupiscence

and dark innocence of her sacred body and soul

and saw her go up in flames

like a bouquet of sable paintbrushes

stacked at her feet like the pyre of the phoenix to come.

Sooner transform the emptiness into something

as absurd as it is meaningful, than ponder the waste

of a good mirage trying to look

for real water down a wishing well.

Sooner try to patch the tear in the sky

that rips me open under full sail running before the wind

and lets all the stars come pouring out

I was saving for a rainy day, with a paint rag,

a discarded face towel sadder

than viridian pine trees in the distance

with an aerial perspective of pthalo blue

gentled and blanched by the intervening atmosphere.

That said and done until the sky drys

I’d rather wear the patches of a compassionate clown

like paint rags on the Sufi blue of my cerulean robes.

I’d rather walk in a pauper’s clothes to show

my solidarity with the cast offs of creation,

not just finished canvases with artsy attitudes

in stiff upper collars and colours

that match the wallpaper like seasonal mood swings.

Sometimes it breaks my heart from the inside out,

it guts me like a tube of alizarin crimson

to see all these fledglings strewn at the foot of my easel,

my tree, my loom, my lean to, like the paint rags

of crumpled, ruined, leftover lives

that couldn’t quite make it as flying carpets.

But I’m not going to forget the ashen sorrows

and habitable earth-tones of starmud

under the winged heels of inspiration.

As for me and my zodiacal house of ill-repute,

my renegade observatory on the wrong side of the tracks,

I’m going to ride this wavelength of light out to the very end

where the wildflowers open

like the complementary loveletters

of a colour wheel, a rainbow come full circle,

unbroken just for them.

The donkey looks into the well.

The well looks back at the donkey.

Art. Life. Zen.

When the line turns round

the donkey at the end is in the lead.

Yesterday’s bleeding paint rag.

Tomorrow’s aesthetic creed.

PATRICK WHITE    

MY HEART SCALDED BY THE ACIDS OF THE WORLD

MY HEART SCALDED BY THE ACIDS OF THE WORLD

My heart scalded by the acids of the world,

thorns in my eyes like atrocities of light,

my tears the Rorschach blood spatter

of kids colouring in the chalk outlines

of their corpses on the sidewalks of Chicago.

Outrage grown so high-pitched it’s shrieking in silence

but there isn’t a mirror you can hold up

to human nature that isn’t cracked

like the sound barrier of a voice-box

that can’t believe the shit it’s hearing

out of the mouths of monostomes. Monostomes

eliminate through the same mouths they eat with

like the austerity budgets of the unseemly rich

ingratiated like tapeworms in the body politic.

Ignorant, avariciously vicious bankers, lobbyists,

Taliban North hating in the name of Jesus

anyone who wasn’t baptized white and leprous

in the same creation myth of the gene pool

they’re immersed in like the charred fossils of doves

in the La Brea tarpits of an approaching eclipse,

politicians hard-wired like wooden dummies

to the ventriloquist puppet-masters pulling their strings

like umbilical cords that give women just enough rope

to go moor themselves to their bodies

like aborted lifeboats in an ice storm

of mysogynist legislation that says like Leviathan

to the sea you must bring forth like a public fountain

or hang from your own lifeline like a coathanger

in a meat locker. While the church diddles

little boys in the choir, go tell, Theotokos,

the mother of God, the sea, when the spirit of light

whispers into her ear you shall bear a child,

she must give immaculate birth to the offspring

of rape and incest, open Pandora’s box

or suffer like an honour killing in the name

of a vaginal probe with the spiritual life

of the used condom that miscarried you

like a outhouse into this legislative grotesquerie of life.

What’s it like to be born so obnoxiously powerful you can

desecrate an entire atmosphere with

the very first breath you take on earth?

To spy on worlds within worlds like a Peeping Tom

to compensate for the stunted sex life

of the keyhole you were in highschool

and still get caught violating your own

perverted taboos like an ingenue with a hooker

you copulate with like a medicine bag of snake oil

with an empty wallet that will later flush you out

in a douche of sexually righteous disgust.

Bullets for hummingbirds on the streets of democracy

window dressing the hearse of your lilac principals

with paid mourners of the dead corrupting the laws

you bequeath as a legacy to the living

like the quotas of private prisons you’re in bed with.

Everybody knows you’re giving a bad name to the sluts

that indulge your morbid appetite for body counts.

You really think we’re going to erect a phallic obelisk

to Amun in the temple of Karnak like a black farce

in your honour? I saw you in the senate of Rome

like an oil executive in the food supply. Ever wonder

why Caligula, mad as he was, made the good horse sense

of Incitatus a full consul over you? Leading plague rats

led by the noserings of party politics by elephants and jackasses.

The people know the difference between eagles and turkey-vultures.

The people can tell the difference between a knot

and a tree ring in the depths of their heartwood,

who’s a moonrise and who’s the goatshead

polluting their housewells like a fracking ceo

who wants to privatize the waters of life in their housewells.

The retributive karma of swarming killer bees

will taint the weedless sunshine of your decrescent,

unfertile smile like a Sahara of the same pesticides

that mutated the honey in the hives of the golden rule.

You will walk naked through the flames of hell

like hogsweed throwing acid in your eyes,

like fanatical spitting cobras on the same

radioactive wavelength of illiterate soul you are.

Your cartouche will be effaced like the writing

on the wall you never learned to read like an Afghan schoolgirl

for fear the word of God might liberate her

from the likes of you. The hadith of Muslim and Bukhari

say Muhammad liked prayer, perfume and women the best.

What do you think he’d think of you whether

you were a Christian or a Jew, Shia or Sunni,

reeking like a corpse flower of religion

over the cadavers of everything he cherished?

When the shepherds of the black camel

raise tall buildings in the desert, when no bird

sings in the eucalyptus candelabras of the promised land,

and a Chinese man, the last on earth, grovels

in the dust at his sister’s feet, aren’t those the signs

the Sufi said ushers in the end of the world?

Meet you at Megiddo on the plains of Jezreel.

Array your banners like the political bunting

of the shills for a military-industrial complex

that size our children up for personal landmines

or the god’s-eye of a drone collating potential roadkill

like a sewer of blood along a highway of tears.

Here’s my prophecy. When the food on my plate

is a lie. When the air I breathe is toxic filth.

When the water I drink explodes in my face.

When the earth groans under the deadweight

of paradise in the charnel houses of the killing fields

and the nuclear waste of the afterbirth

of the first fusion bomb is leaking into the watersheds

of Washington State like history being made

retroactively like the half life of plutonium.

When the sea is vulgarized like a garbage dump

as the moon is soon to be and childhood already is.

When the police approach their own species

more and more dressed up like insects

in the toolkits and garb of war and nine civilians

die for every soldier in the field since World War II

and there are no medals handed out for the casualties

killed in the doorways of third world powers

by those who have come to save their hearts and homes

like well-armed cowards who mythically inflate

the courage it takes to initiate a scorched earth policy

in an air-conditioned computer room of apocalyptic vidiots.

All militaries are climax-controlled millenarians

with their finger on the trigger of the Big Bang

like the G-spot on a starmap of sidereal explosions.

When hopelessness is more accurate than faith in life.

When four hundred billion dollars is spent

on an F-35 to feed the political career banks

of insatiable contractors and a bevy of senators

on taxpayer dollars who just excised 80 billion

worth of foodstamps from the cupboards of the poor,

one fifth of the proto-type of an underdeveloped

fighter in the womb with a cleft cockpit for a palette

from an agricultural bill of privileged cronies

civilization is supposed to be based upon

like the latifundia of the homeless masses of Rome,

and twenty five million children a year

starve to death in the retractible wheel wells

of birth and death, misery, ignorance, greed

in a conservative circus of black-hearted clowns

that don’t even hand out bread anymore

to the masses distracted by the puerile views

of celebrity juveniles and senile rockstars

that pimp for the news in the refugee camps of Darfur

like the children of the Visigoths Roman slavers

bought for dogmeat until Alaric sacked the capital

and the Whore of Babylon put on the vestments of the Vatican

to put a holy spin on their self-indulgent sins of omission.

Mum to the subterfuges of virtual reality,

Wall Street screams at Main Street let them eat

genetically modified birthday cake to commemorate

inequality, fratricide, and the slow death of liberty

like a foodchain used to garotte the poor

in a reactionary response to the storming of the Bastille.

History repeats itself like communism and Karl Marx,

the first time as a tragic will to power, the second

as the black farce of free enterprise no one can afford.

The mystery of humankind. The bloodline of war.

One red thread running like a theme through it all,

A beading of skulls, rosaries, prayer-beads,

Kaiser, Caesar, Czar, if history repeats itself

it’s because it’s become a cliche of hell,

that the oppressed die first like shock troops,

cannon fodder, human folderol, in return

for killing their own off in exchange for citizenship

in a cannibal nation founded on a principle

of I eat you, now you eat me by proxy

so I can wash my hands clean of the affair

like a racist snowbank in a heat wave

trickling down the last leg of your esophogeal gutter

like an economic theory on a fire-hydrant,

as I said earlier, monostomatically, trying

to keep it together as it melts away

like an ice-cream cone toppled in the dirt

doesn’t it, as the ants, o do you see the ants coming,

millions of little jaws like colonies of tribal migrants,

the Cimri, the Goths, the Quadi, the Marcomanni,

the huddled masses, the oppressed, the poor,

as it was in Rome when their wealth began to rot

in the nostrils of the have-nots, coming

to sop you up like a dessert that will fall off its sceptre

when the inevitable garbage can lid comes off

and the rich turn holy, rendering unto Caesar

that which is Caesar’s as the state reverts

to a mercenary church for Byzantine corporations.

When the measure of a nation is the size of its cemeteries.

When human nature pulls itself up

like the lungs of its bloodroots in the Amazon

as if the fruits by which it was once known by

were no longer necessary as the nuts and berries

of why we’re here, and the healing powers

of the stars and the flowers no longer thrill us

with the loveliness of the way they cure our ills

and there’s an appetite for desecration in our wonder,

a restless ingratitude in our attitude toward life,

less mystery in the things we dream of,

more self-destructiveness than risk in the chances

we take to avoid ourselves like the words

that leave us speechless as the mouth harp

of a hyoid bone that’s run out of things to raise

the genomes of our mitochondrial mother tongues

up the stars in praise, in horror, in love,

in abysmal devotion to the future of becoming,

less the undertaker in the garden disinterring

our remains to ascertain if it were suicide or murder,

and more about the gardener in the undertaker

germinating unmodified seed metaphors

on the windowsills of our magnificent solitude

that will root like white and dark matter

in all available dimensions of the mindspace before us

as if we were all quantumly entangled like wild grapevines

in drinking the waters of life from our own prophetic skulls

and tasting the wine of our own starmud

like the mystic vintners of the light and the rain

in the eyes of the unfathomable nights

the sun shines at midnight, unaccountable as the stars,

to ripen the darkness in everyone’s flesh and blood.

PATRICK WHITE

POOR LITTLE OCEAN THAT'S ONLY GOT ONE WAVE

POOR LITTLE OCEAN THAT’S ONLY GOT ONE WAVE

Poor little ocean that’s only got one wave.

Do the tides laugh at you in the bays of the moon,

do the seagulls shriek to see you’ve only

got one eyelid per eye? A mere wink of providence?

A flower closing up at night, a candle in bud

that never quite breaks into flame

like the raving silks of the poppies

it dreams about dancing on its grave?

In the penumbral shadow of time you’re

a sunami on a sundial, the fin of a mountain

on a lunar flood plain of oceanic consciousness.

The light tattoos the firmament on every

single drop of you, thousands of constellations

you’ve never even heard of, vows of love

you have yet to keep, and in

every tear of your third eye crying itself

to sleep at night, the hidden paths of zodiacs

waiting for you to firewalk them like the sun.

All in one or one in all. Downpour or

rain drop, vapour or glacier, inside

every experience resides its opposite,

so sometimes a few can be too much

and too much not enough. As myriad fish

in the sea, so the wavelengths that arrive

like prophets in the belly of the whale

from deep in space. You can view the whole

of the tapestry, every theme of the vision

in place or you can unravel it like

the flying carpet you’re meditating on

thread by thread, labyrinth within labyrinth,

like the strand of a stranger’s hair

on the shoulder of a beautiful woman

with more faces and phases of the moon

than she has veils to cover them.

My own eyes the most revealing of starmaps

I’ve ever followed into the dark, I don’t need

an astrolabe or an abacus to count the nightskies

that have sweetened the translucency of those jewels

like diamonds on the surface of the waters of life

whose flowing can’t be cut like an umbilical cord.

Being is Seeing with all your senses on nightwatch at once,

the full palette of the rainbow, the burning bridge

plunging into your mindstream like one wing

of a bird into its opposite to be reborn as a dragon

that embodies the serpent as well as the dove.

An alloy of peace and war. Dragons teeth sown

around the golden fleece with water-gilded horns.

A seventeenth century rose with medieval thorns.

Taboo as a sign of the value you put on your blessings

when you know as well as an ocean

they were meant to be shared as the only way

you could keep their munificence alive

like a new moon on the tongue of an oyster shell

that gapes open-mouthed at what a little irritation

has brought forth like a virgin after a crone.

In a crowd I’m irrevocably alone. On my own

I can hear the lyrics of the mermaids

like a seance of hormones deep within me

urging me back as if disaster had somehow

grown nostalgic for the ice-berg that sent

the Titanic to the bottom of its subconscious

like a man buried alive at sea in a iron coffin,

counting on his Zen buoyancy---Seven times down,

eight times up. Such is life.---to resurface

like a seal pup through an air hole on an ice floe

with the heart of a killer whale and the appetite

of a great white shark in hunting season

when it’s time to cull the humans for what they do

to the innocent like feral pigs tusking the earth

like a wound that never closes however it scars

like the moon ploughing the Fertile Crescent.

PATRICK WHITE  

ECHOES OF FACES, DEPORTED WATERCOLOURS OF SOUND

ECHOES OF FACES, DEPORTED WATERCOLOURS OF SOUND

Echoes of faces, deported watercolours of sound

in the humid air tonight. Everybody gone.

Silence pending in a morgue of cars. The band

dismantled. The fire hydrants waiting

to be donated like heart transplants flatlining

like hot radiators in low rent tropical apartments

too greasy to make love in as the enamel buttercups

melt into pools of rancid butter the flies lap from.

Eerie Martian light of the tungsten lamp posts

dulling the more authoritative greens

of the leaves cloying the view from upstairs windows,

soiled by looking upon the world,

than the innocence that toyed with the eyes of the wise

in the spring before the flowers began

to take themselves for granted and the violet petunias

starting running like imperious blood down the sides

of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon

that once bloomed for love but now

are muncipally maintained for the tourists.

You can feel the plants ripening like muscles

in the broth of the swamps, brooding in the cauldrons

of a witching hour demanding the blood sacrifice

of the King of the Waxing Year. The apportioning

of his flesh to the exotic fertility of the fields.

The woods an abattoir of cattle-prodding mosquitoes,

better to sit immobile inside and explore

the coma of July like a missing link in the foodchain,

thinking in heat just a way of grouting in the chinks

between the bricks of starmud that have been

baking all day in the kilns of the sun

like the front steps of a temple to the hymen

of the new moon in Virgo pole dancing in the dark.

The light of the stars as viscous as the silver trails

of the snails the world sticks to like fridge magnets

and gum, smeared on the lens of an astigmatic atmosphere

letting the mystic details of their foregone

lumens of enlightenment sweat for themselves.

Estranged doorways and a diffident malevolence

in the air that flows like lava and volcanic spume

over the Pompey of people sleeping in this small town

as if some mass murder had been committed

and nobody was surprised enough to care, hell

closer to their bodies than heaven to their hearts.

PATRICK WHITE

YOU FOUND ME WANTING AND YOU LEFT

YOU FOUND ME WANTING AND YOU LEFT

You found me wanting and you left

and the sea wept in me in the bay of my arms

like the new moon in the old as if

all the sorrows of the world were gathered there

and I didn’t know what to pray for anymore

as my tears turned red as the blood

of a hemorrhaging rose and the sundials

circled like the shadows of sharks in the water.

I lived in an oyster shell with a razor smile

like a disappointment to the moon, trying

in secret to turn my agony into black pearls

of occult wisdom that might retrieve the stars

we once walked under from the black hole

of love I fell into like a grave of light

I had to arise from on the other side, night

after night, my eyes in the rags of the mirages

I clung to as if that were the only skin I had left

in the desert cold of the moon after earthset.

Hurt? Destroyed? Did the rain crack like my tears

in the desiccated creekbeds of my starmud

trying to read their own lifelines in the deltas

of my eyes where they entered the void

and in the hieroglyphics that slashed my lips

like the wrecked cartouches of an heretical pharaoh

who had worshipped you alone as if the sun

had a feminine gender for anyone who travelled by night?

The worst fire in hell is the one that goes out on its own

like a curse that doesn’t make a difference

to the way you feel though you’ve mastered

this discipline of fire you kindled

with the arrows that longed for you

like the shadows of birds for a bow of moonlight

that stung like my fingertips for ever

having strung it with my spinal cord

like a guitar whipping its one good eye

like a soloist flagellating himself with the music

he used to play for you when you were

upstairs asleep, in the key of your dreams,

as if I could feather you in the most

incomparable nightskies you’ve ever

disappeared into like a fragrance of stars

from the rootfires of the wild asters you left in ashes.

Been a long time since the wind whistled

through the locust trees like a harmonica of thorns,

and the light etched albino ferns of ice on the windows.

The wound of your absence deepened my imagination

like a valley of death I had to firewalk through

like a scapegoat I drove out of myself

into a wilderness that was more about temptation

than atonement for anything I hadn’t done.

We may have separated like a wishbone

where the sacred rivers join the conversation

around the council of the three fires, wishing

each other the best we were capable of asking for,

though I was the one who came up short

like a strawman on a pyre to scare the crows

out of the starwheat, and you were as sure

as Spica in Virgo you were making all the right moves,

to fill your hollow silos with the staff of a new life

shy of my dark abundance illuminating

your bright vacancy by water-gilding your tears

with gold at the end of a moondog instead of a rainbow.

I tried to indulge you like the luxury

of a new beginning I couldn’t afford.

It’s hard to assess what might be of value

to someone when you’re always lavishing them

with the inestimable. I thought the stars

were more than enough but you wanted

diamonds for windows and sapphires for eyes

and all I had to offer in lieu of the real thing

were fractured telescopes of the way I saw the world.

PATRICK WHITE  

YESTERDAY'S PHILOSOPHIES ARE THE JUNTAS OF TODAY

YESTERDAY’S PHILOSOPHIES ARE THE JUNTAS OF TODAY

Yesterday’s philosophies are the juntas of today.

Here comes a man who wants to lay down the law

like the Burgess Shales. You can smell him with your eyes.

You can taste the machine-guns in his psychotic heart

waking up with the birds in the dawn

like a turkey vulture waking up with a bad cough

to kill another schoolhouse full of kids

learning C stands for coffins, to prove

parasites can be every bit as murderous

as predators in the killing fields of recess.

There’s an ideological maggot in his brain

and masses of worms in his heart. He wants

a better future for flies and if he can’t get it

by rigging an election, he’ll spread it

like the hydrophobic infection of a rabid dog.

Overwhelmed, shell-shocked into indifference

as if you were sleep-shopping among bombs

in a walking coma, as if you’d lost your fig-leaf

of protective innocence and your outrage

were flatlining, having found a way to hide

and disguise yourself like the living under

the dismembered corpses of the dead. You

ever watch a kid learning to tie its shoes

if it’s got any, and remember not so long ago

that was you, before you entered this abattoir

of razorblades that cut your eyelids off

with new ideas as if you’d just come of age?

Real flesh and blood, eyes, ears, noses,

fingertips and tresses of scorched hair wrinkled

like the filaments of lightbulbs that have burnt out,

brutalized by the occluded second-guesses

of the demonic abstractions that take possession

of the human heart and drain it like a tit for hungry ghosts.

Look at the daylilies in their death shrouds

withered by famine because of the toxic death

of millions of bees in the honey-pots of the wildflowers

who couldn’t adapt to the neonicotinoids

of the counter-evolution of Frankensteinian industrial research

wrecking sex for the birds and the bees.

I’m a reasonably safe Canadian who’s hoarse

from screaming murder like a higher education

with a free medical programme in the iambs

of Greek prosody that limp across the stage

to stand out from the chorus like a critical investigation

into the interrogative nature of tragedy

when it happens to somebody else. I’ve worn

blood-caked armchairs out trying to come to terms

with all the atrocities I’ve been left out of by luck

as if I should have been on that plane

with the rest of the world so I know what

I’m talking about when I say I can feel

the pity that purges the play so much easier

than I can what it’s like to identify a child

in the wreckage by the shoes they were wearing

before they had their legs torn off like dolls

in a vendetta of cordite and political voodoo.

I’ve been a bilious witness in the slaughterhouse

of the mad monkeys with a genius for hate

that makes even the unutterable silence feel ashamed

of being one of them by genetic acclamation

whatever you say about the inoffensiveness

of my immunized humanitarianism trying

to keep the snakepit at bay like a lapwing

that really hasn’t got much of a future left

to distract it from like the fledgling afterbirth of tomorrow.

Everybody bares their fangs like the moon

to defend the foundation stones of plack

the molars of their society were established on

like the alphabet blocks of their rights and constitutions

set up like a great barrier reef of checks and balances

to govern the big fish from eating all the little ones

until recently. The atavistic wolf nature

of the corporate blue whales has gone insane

killing the krill, that’s us, they live upon.

They’re eating the foodchain like the afterbirth

of a miscarriage of their own genetically modified appetites.

Thirty years of lean cows for every pharaonic year

of fat ones. Even the moon’s taken off

too much weight. There’s no wine goblet

in my brother’s saddlebags worth stealing anymore.

A business reputation for fair dealing

is the defamation of the character of a maggot

that knows better than most corporations do

when enough is enough. And worming their way

into the rest like the basic elements of life

is just institutional pleonaxia that will eat itself to death.

PATRICK WHITE

IF ONLY I COULD REMEMBER YOU WAS YOU WERE

IF ONLY I COULD REMEMBER YOU AS YOU WERE

If only I could remember you as you were

for a few, brief radiant moments as indelible

as light in space and not as time would have it

the way things have changed. To see you

lingering in the doorway on a winter night,

the snow lying lightly on your hair like the Pleiades

over your shoulder descending below the treeline

as if it knew more about saying good-bye than you did,

and o how I loved you for it. If only I could

remember that lonely ghost of a mirage

that hovered over the watershed of your tears

and looked at me like the first lifeboat

you’d seen in a thousand years respond

to your s.o.s. in a hourglass. If only I could remember

the fragrance of the summer rain on your skin

as if it had mistaken you for one of the flowers

and how I used to like wiping your tears away

with my opposable thumb like plum blossoms from your cheeks.

Eternity coming to the surface of time

like old corduroy roads and bones in a makeshift graveyard.

Not likely I’ll ever see you again in this life

but if only I could remember you before circumstance

underwhelmed itself and killed the ambiance

of our last dance by turning all the lights on at once.

But there you go, no help for it. The nightbird

transits the moon and the eternal sky as is said in Zen

doesn’t inhibit the flight of the white clouds.

And this moment, too, though it’s endured

a thousand deaths to come to this afterlife,

always saying good-bye to some aspect of you

that symbolizes the evanescence of love and life

in metaphors that buff the open wound

like scar tissue on the moon, like fireflies

welding living insights into the dead brain coral

of this encyclopedic coma life

can sometimes seem without you, even after

all these ensuing misadventures it would take a fire

and half a dozen bottles of wine to tell you about

if only I could remember you as you once were

like the lamb that laid down with the lion without fear.

For light years, images of you have flashed out of the abyss

as sharp and quick and vital as moonlight

wielding a sabre, or a bird quickened by a purpose

out of the unknown into the unknown

and I recognize them as blossoms that have blown

far from the tree that was lovelier

than the whole orchard to me, though angels

attended upon it like scripture from its roots to its leaves,

you were the locust tree with your demonic thorns

I wanted to tear my heart on like a rag of blood

on the galactic razorwire that encircled your heart

like a storm of dark matter with unlimited potential

for creative destruction that got the light out of the way

long enough for us to see what glowed behind it.

If only I could remember you as you were

when we both made eye-contact with each other

like exo-planets in the void, and understood spontaneously

it wasn’t going to take much of a wavelength

for either of us to understand this immediately

as if we could read each other’s shadows like Mayan calendars.

Water hemlock, wild parsnip, sometimes

the memories scald like volcanic dew on bare skin,

but seldom have I ever regretted

that I lived through you for awhile,

when the stars raged in my heart like a madman

obsessed by the crazy wisdom of a woman

who had the wingspan of a bow on a bent event horizon

but knew enough about compassion

to push the burning arrow of my fascination with her

all the way through like a blood sacrifice to love and life

and the mystery that moved in the darkness up ahead

like the fork in the road that separated us,

like a wishbone that had granted all it had to give.

How tenderly painful the brevity of what

we actually relive again as if some moments in life

are illuminated by a different light than that

we read by in bed late into the night

looking for translucency in the windows of insight

that keep on opening their eyes in this recurrent dream

like the black waterlilies of new moons coming into bloom.

PATRICK WHITE