BORN INTO POVERTY AND HUMILIATION
Born into poverty and humiliation and
the degradation
of a woman at the hands of a man who
said he once loved her,
had to have her for the world, begged
and pleaded,
achieved her and then tried to put her
out like a dance step
he was learning to do with a
cigarette-butt in the dirt.
Not a humiliation of mine, not a
degradation of me
I didn’t have the rage and discipline
to overcome,
but the boyish impotence of watching
her suffer
day after day, the occlusion of the
light and human warmth
she was to four frightened children who
were witness
to their black out father’s swarming
drunks
when he got out of jail like a hive of
killer bees
and she were too isolated and hurt to
keep
anything back from me, the eldest, her
sounding post,
who couldn’t do anything to help her
except
pray to an unforgiving god to let him
grow up in time
to murder his father while he was still
conscious enough
to feel the bright steel of a son’s
sterling blood
shuck the flint knapped oyster of his
heart
to see if there were ever a pearl
inside I could pluck out
like the evil eye of a mad moonrise on
another binge.
As my mother withdrew like an ice age
into herself
I tried to decipher her tears like
unbroken circles of rain
in the heartwood of a young boy’s
smashed guitar.
A strawberry heart with the savage scar
of the moon
across the bass string of her throat
like a martyr
garotted by what she had to go through
to survive
her own life with four kids she
controlled like the damage
done by love on the rampage that had
trampled them.
I’m not a Momma’s boy. She didn’t
cling to my brother
and I like an umbilical cord on a
burning box kite
and we took more than our quota of
self-destructive
chances in the world to prove to
ourselves we might yet
outgrow the stigma of being men in the
image of our father.
And the rough-hewn diamonds in my two
sister’s eyes,
as well as my mother’s intransigent
independence
to sacrificially transcend her
circumstances at all costs,
long before the feminist revolution, I
took it for granted,
all women who had grown up poor were as
liberated
as the life-nurturing events of
underwater volcanoes
breast feeding the ocean like islands
of drowned sailors
that had smashed against the rocks of
their seafaring wills.
Viking mermaids in bobbi-sox and saddle
shoes
who sang alluringly to their vagrant
boyfriends
they weren’t amused by the course
they had set for themselves
by relying on their starmaps like
mythically inflated safety nets
as they lowered the Titanic like a
lifeboat on the moon
they inherited from their parents like
shipwrights in drydock.
Pull yourself up out of poverty by your
bootstraps, Paddy.
Get an education. And I thought, why
was that? No one
going to lower the bucket to help pull
me out of the birth canal
I fell into like the wrong housewell?
And I did. Amo, amas, amat,
amamus, amatis, amant. I was taught
civilization owed
everything it stole from the poor to
agriculture,
and ruining a few wolves by turning
them into sheep-dogs.
Animal husbandry that culls the people
like roadkill.
I don’t think that anymore. My
teachers were the dupes
of the lie they benignly bought into to
keep their jobs.
Civilization, government, law,
education, economics,
no more than the pine-scented deodorant
the rich use
to disguise the blood musk of the
abattoirs
slowly butchering the poor emotionally,
creatively,
imaginatively as a kind of collateral
damage
like torn beavers, wrecked muskrats,
meaty groundhogs
water-logged in a ditch the
turkey-vultures administer
like bankers and undertakers eating the
guts out of
as the rich pass by every summer
casually on their way
to the vacation cottage that will
enable them
to get back to nature, ravening on the
fat of the poor
like the American dream or whatever
passes for one
in Canada from the floor of the House
of Commons.
The rich sustain their vision of a good
life like ants
eating the eyes out of the heads on the
soft shoulders
of a way of life that has made them
arrogant, stupid
and extinctually feeble. You know what
civilization is
when you boil the fat out of chaos,
it’s a deodorant
for the rich and powerful, corrupt,
hateful, and mendacious
to smell like herbivores instead of
overseas bloodbanks
that stain their teeth and lips red in
claw and fang
like a dowdy, middle-aged political
rose smearing
thick lipstick like dubbin on her
waterproof mouth
she’s lies through as if life were a
strawberry milkshake
she’s sucking the bubbles of the
bottom up
through the proboscis of a straw longer
than the budget
she proposes to make everyone else but
her go first?
I studied history at university. The
filthy rich
and their inconsequential bloodlines
like varicose veins
that have grown stiff with the plack of
their porky progeny
killing the poor of one country off
against another
then flying like Churchill to Poland to
sit down with Stalin
to see who gets to imperialize the
cadavers
in the boneyards of Europe behind
Roosevelt’s back,
because the U.S. is still too much of
an ingenue
to know how to use a secret police
force effectually
over port and cigars to keep a strangle
hold on the people
they hang from meat hooks like abstract
eviscerations
of foreign policy, as if flesh and
blood had nothing to do with it.
Look at their bodies scotched by
overindulgence
and privilege, see them naked at a
photo-op
squealing like pigs at a trough living
in their own shit
as Napoleon said of Talleyrand like
excrement
in a silk stocking. Imagine history
sitting on a toilet
listening to the vital organs of an
overfed sea cow
like a trickle down theory of economics
claiming
as it breaks like a political wind in
an executive bathroom,
it can eat your food for you as a way
of filling your empty bellies
with the crumbs and fins of the loaves
and fishes
it feeds on as if it eliminates through
the same bung hole
of a mouth it feasts with. Monostomes.
Look it up.
Who hasn’t compiled a secret hit list
of black ops
to be meted out contractually like an
apocalyptic mode
of creative street justice for the
atrocities they had to swallow
like bad medicine in an age of nuclear
miracles
where the rich eat pearls and gold to
avoid the black plague
of the fleas that docked their yachts
in Genoa, or Cape Cod,
to teach Europe first and now North
America
to the chagrin of the McCarthyite
clones of Ted Cruz
and the feudal Republicans, death is an
equal opportunity Democrat
that treats everyone fairly without
distinction
like a plague rat chewing through the
morgues of Congress?
Imagine that. The high and mighty
brought low
by a little bug the NSA didn’t plant
in the name
of the panic button on homeland
security
genetically modifying the collective
unconscious of the mob
like the super id of Monsanto in a
cornfield of dreams
killing the bees and the Monarch
butterflies with neonicotinoids
as surely as the Germans used Zyklon B
at Auschwitz
or Assad fumigated the suburbs of
Damascus with sarin gas.
Whatever direction the wind blows,
World War I
all over again. Rumsfeld peddling
mustard gas
and the dragonfly helicopters to
deliver it to Baghdad
against the Iranians and the Kurds like
cologne to a dictator
with sons more subordinately vicious
than their old man
smiling like a Pacific dawn on the smog
of Los Angeles.
And don’t tell me the terrorists
don’t roam in packs
of rabid pit bulls tearing a child on
her way to school apart.
Or the profiteering capitalists in the
black markets
of the wars they start don’t think
the poor are the reason
they suffer, and don’t take anyone’s
pain to heart but their own.
Or the poor themselves don’t eat
their own when
there’s nothing else in the house of
life to chew on
but the gummy cliches of the snake-oil
politicians
selling them the artificial fangs of
yesterday’s vampires
as if everyone were entitled to a
bloodbank of their own
as an antidote to the poisons they
ingest like their daily bread.
Looking for a happy ending to the black
farce
of the life you’re living? Who can
blame you? I don’t.
Every little piggy’s got to get its
own, every dog,
its bone, only so much time and then
forever and forever
and forever, nothing to look forward
to, nothing
behind you to look too kindly upon.
Nothing but
a waterclock of empty moments to
preoccupy you
with how minisculely irrelevant
everything is at a distance
that disappears into itself like a
blackhole
nothing can get out of, the bones of
star-nosed moles
buried alive like tubers that groped
the dark
with the green tentacles of their eyes
awhile
and then withered like used condoms
that have the feel
of the skin of old men in a wet dream.
Life peaks
like an amoeba on a mountaintop, fish
in the sky
out of their heights, a few astronauts
like dust
on a starmap, lies that binge in the
mouths
of corrupt politicians crying big slow
tears
of crocodile saliva for the victims of
their hydrophobia.
I wish I had a dad in the grave I could
lay flowers upon
and talk to in the intimacy of the
eternal silence
like a son that went fishing with his
lighthouse of a father
and got lost at sea on the moon as my
mother
called out to us from the far shore
like a foghorn into
the forlorn dampness of an impending
echo in the air
of a recurring nightmare that ended
with a dove descending
as if somebody cared enough to return
the message.
Three bells and all’s well. Or
straight from the heart
of Julian of Norwich, all shall be
well, all shall be well,
and all manner of things shall be well.
Instead of this hell
that, too, shall pass. Like a kidney
stone we pissed out
like a diamond in the rough. Like the
ostrakon of an asteroid
with our name on it coming at us like a
right cross
to the jawbone of the asses braying
like pundits on tv
as if this were Periclean Athens,
spinning fables
of oracular equality at the beginning
of democracy
for those of the citizenry rich enough
to be free,
and for the rest of the mob, the
afterbirth of what’s left.
Optimistic autopsies chalked like flow
charts
on the godforsaken sidewalks of the
stillborn.
PATRICK WHITE
