THIRTY-NINE CHILDREN

THIRTY-NINE CHILDREN

Thirty-nine children destroyed.

Four of them, sisters.

Their blood a red atlas, spattered roses

on the bedroom walls they cringed behind,

their unfinished bodies and minds,

finished. Does anyone remember

what a child is

when it is not collaterally dismembered

into small feet and hands and faces

that had no choice but to trust the world

that savaged it like roses?

Five toes, an ankle and a heel

still occupy the floral running shoe

that never made it all the way to school.

Your bootprints on the throats of baby swans

like the bombpits of mass graves

where the hysterical mothers rave

in grief and rage

over what you have damaged

like ferocious boars who wear

the tusks of the moon like missiles

to gore children embedded like roots in the night

out of their sleep

like a plague of angels

sanitized by the height

you kill from.

You are not a man.

You are not human.

The lightning is more merciful than you.

Don’t let the medals

or the protocols of murder

you glory in

fool you,

you’re a ghoul in a cockpit,

death’s eye in a drop of dew.

Nine civilians killed for every soldier,

the cowards are herded into the military

for their own safety

and for the civilians who take it by the millions

on the chin,

they don’t hand out medals,

there’s nothing to win or promote.

Do you know how much courage it takes

to die when you’re nine years old

to gratify a general’s heart,

to advance the campaigns of the politicians,

to appall the pundits into passionate opinions

that suckle the mob at the faucets of their fangs

with the milk and honey

of primetime bedside stories

to make hate and war

and the obscenties of human lovelessness,

rape, disease, indifference, and mutilation

seem the reasonable acts of old men

whose hearts clamour like swords and anvils

like hammers and gavils

to inspire others to kill children

in the arms of their mothers

so they can stand like a lighthouse of history

on the coast of an idea

lost in the smog of their ghosts?

Hideous, geriatric monkeys raging

against their own androphobic hallucinations,

fashioning nooses out of umbilical cords

and fuses out of the spine

to ambush a shopping mall,

a school, a hospital

to expedite the death of innocence

as the necessitious consequence

of their long, hard experience

as seasoned executioners

trying to get it up

like flags in the morning

to sway spring blood into dying for them

even before it’s fully unfolded

like the proxies of autumn

shedding their patchwork comforters

over the coffins of the dead

who are forsaken by the earth

like the windfall of a poisonous tree

rooted in their hearts like a foreign policy.

Thirty-nine children destroyed.

Thirty-nine candles of life

it took a universe to tallow and ignite

snuffed out like thirty-nine birthdays by cordite

dropping like serpents from a sky

through bomb-bay doors

that open like ovens of manna

to make bitter, black bread

out of the bodies of children

who thought of God as the pantry behind their prayers.

Is your god leavened by the dead?

Does your country own a concentration camp yet?

Does it sow and reap and thresh like a cannibal?

Does it eat its own and those of the others

who were born of the same mothers as you

until you unbound your thread of blood

from the strong rope of our common humanity

and singling yourself out for a manifest destiny

you expeditiously improvise out of your lies as you go along

threatened by Goliath in Gaza

throwing rocks at David in an F-l8,

you remember the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising,

you remember how the Nazis fought

and obliterate the neighbourhood

as if the only thing you understood

of all that courage and suffering

were merely a change of jackboots

and the star-crossed symbols of blood

that drive the people out of their homes

like the innocent scapegoats of the tribes

that drove their sins out into the wilderness solitude

to turn into Azazel, Satan’s standard-bearer,

master of all evil, spawn of the void, returning.

Thirty-nine children destroyed

and the whole neighbourhood burning.

The new crematoria fall from the sky

and it’s ashes in the blink of an eye

for thirty-nine children in sneakers

who had the wrong ally,

who did their homework

and went to bed to bed early

to learn how to die.

I’m sick of your holy wars. Muhammad,

peace be upon him,

would cover himself up again

under his cloak,

this time like an eclipse of shame

when the angel came

to demand he recite light upon light,

nur wa nur,

were he asked about the blood

of the mothers and the children you killed

like hashashim in the shadows of noon,

to rewrite the book that makes things clear

like a blood smear

you can’t wash off the light.

And I’m sick of the supermen,

the ubermensch

and the chosen people,

and all the righteous bells

that have been shoved down the throat

of the crooked church steeple

like a goose that’s been stuffed

for spiritual pate.

I’m sick of the indifference

of the glossy, intellectual versions

of the human perversions

they discuss with rubber gloves

fitted neatly like theories over their hearts.

What theory ever picked up

a child’s body parts?

See a naked man. See

a naked woman and a child.

No sound. But the man batters

the woman and child to death

whether with a bomb or a club, no matter,

until all that’s left is splintered bone, blood

and a pulpy mess.

Now ask yourself,

the sound back on,

what could the man say,

what could the man possibly say

that would make these exactions okay?

What reason, what ideology, government

faith, loyalty, career, political advantage,

what military passion, or zeal

for revengeful reform,

what lie to caress the mob,

or bobbing apple of truth

could be recited

even out of the mouth of an angel,

or the orifice of a demon, or worse,

both ends of a human

in front of a microphone

to justify what was expedited

to get the voters excited,

convinced of your will to kill?

To get the job done?

Thirty-nine children destroyed,

and their spirits stream through the void

like small thoughts that were easily forgotten,

their lives unravelled like stars

before they had a chance to shine,

and their hearts, crushed like young grapes

before they could taste their own wine,

and in the souls of the mothers,

thorns, and feral blossoms on the vine

that hold their wombs hostage with razor-wire

as the one-eyed liars,

their magnetic hair on fire,

take questions from the choir.

Thirty-nine children destroyed,

tiny hands like starfish and flowers

blooming through the rubble of cement

you broke like bread over them.

That is not what Jesus meant.

That is not what Moses meant.

That is not what Muhammad meant.

That is not what Buddha meant.

You burn butterflies with an airforce

you say was heaven-sent

as if they were children

to scourge the rockets in the snakepit

and embellish the odour of hatred.

But you don’t get it.

That isn’t what life means

when a child screams out in the night

at you in her dreams

descending from hell

like the mouth

of a terrible, blood-stained bell with teeth

that look like crescent moons

and the long, prophetic scars

of the black stars on your wings

to eat her.

And if I were to curse, and I won’t,

what could be worse

if you were to meet her,

after her death, after your death

after the fanatical insanity of the slaughter,

is the footnote of a slugline

that impaled the matter

on the stakes of axial cliches,

if you were to remember what a child is,

if you were to meet her

and know in the flash

of a bomb to the slaughter,

as she looks up at you like the sky,

like thirty-nine flowers in terror,

you fell upon your own daughter

like a perversion of rain

again and again and again?

PATRICK WHITE

A RED DROP OF RAIN

A RED DROP OF RAIN

A red drop of rain

every once and awhile

among billions of silver tears

and I can tell someone

who knows how to love

by the way they cry

not water or lace or diamonds

but blood. Or,

as the old Sufi says,

it’s just another lover’s tale.

And there’s nothing

but lipstick on the mirror

where your lips used to be

and it’s colder than kissing a ghost.

And I remember how, now

that’s it’s of no consequence to confess,

you always wanted to be the lifeboat

so I always had to be the S.O.S.

that made you feel needed.

You never liked me

when I was strong

so I broke it all down

to be loved,

and mastered your heart

by perfecting the art

of being unworthy of it.

PATRICK WHITE

YOU'RE LONELY

YOU’RE LONELY

You’re lonely

and you think it’s because

you’re not understood

in a small town

where extraordinarily ordinary people

go about the business of living

without expecting glorious results.

You show up catastrophically

on my doorstep

at three in the morning

and ask if I’ll let you in like a wound

that has slashed you open like a mouth

and you know I won’t turn you away.

You don’t know what to do with your beauty

and neither do I

without a prelude to the encounter

and so you ask me how to live.

I turn myself inside out

looking for loose change

in the pockets of a dream

to drop into the begging bowl of the silence

and sliced by the insight

of a master in medieval Japan

tell you every step of the way

should crush the head of the question.

You think I am immediate and wise

and for the moment it’s a useful delusion

as I look into the reasonable facsimiles of light

that are posing as your eyes

and see a painful young woman

trying to sail like a swan through her first eclipse.

I dodge the euphoric arrows

that randomly fly

from your toxological lips

and try not to get sucked into

thinking of you as a wishbone with hips

and outrunning the flashflood of the effusion

turn my attention back to your confusion.

The moon is in my window.

A muse has come

to ask for inspiration.

Water asks the fire how to flow

but what you really want to know

what you truly want to learn

is how to burn.

You’re trying to pull the moon

like a hot sword out of a cold stone

to kill your lover over and over and over again

like a wasp on a brain

trying to sting itself into honey.

If you weren’t so beautiful,

you’d be funny

but I make the appropriate concessions

and listen to your accusations

like the intimate confessions

of a promiscuous nun

who’s never slept with anyone.

I listen quietly and tenderly

to the chafing of the restless snakes

in your angry abyss

gathering myself up like visionary rain

above the cauldron of a distant, cosmic ocean

to fall like a cooling kiss

on the flaring heads of the igneous.

I milk the fangs of the moon

into experimental antidotes

and no fool around matcheads and cobras

summon the wind like an ambulance on standby

to immunize me against the toxicity

of your insistence

I’m your private school.

Morgana la Fey at Merlin High,

eager to learn, eager to deepen her darkness.

You want me to teach your eyes to flow

through a labyrinth of underground dreams

you’ve tunnelled through your pain like a blind mole

waiting for moonlight to wash you out

of all your crazy bloodstreams.

If you can’t live with the one you love

the way you long to

appealing to oblivious gods

maybe you can kill them into it.

If you’re hurt so deeply

you can no longer feel your heart,

maybe there’s an art

that can be mastered

to do it so discretely

the blood that unspools on the blade

prefers the wounded poppy of their death

that stalks them like a bloodclot in a rose

to the lonely craving of their next breath

to feel the edge again

that addicts them like the moon

to another hit on a battered vein.

I can hear what you’re thinking,

I can see what you feel through my fingers.

I know you haven’t come to heal

or put your hand in the hand of another

that isn’t folded like a secret loveletter

of Damascene steel

ghouled by jewels of blood.

I can peel the eclipse from your eyes

like an executioner’s hood

and fill the darkness

with the music of diamonds

falling like rain from their crowns of coal.

I can look into your eyes

like the lies you wanted everyone to believe in

and make them come true.

I can teach you to hunt like a magician

in the twenty-first century

and dropping your halo down to your feet

encircle you in the dark clarity

of an inviolable sanctuary

with gates of golden horn

that swing open like the moon

between the wingspan of her crescents.

Or I can turn a word like a stone

and set the angels free

like petrified bone

amazed by the new lucidity

that remarrows it like the clone

of a woman no one can be

until she returns the sword to herself

she lay down like the moon

surrendering to the sea

in a holy war

that cut the throats of the waves

and made widows of the sacred tides

she concealed like the secret insurgency

of her own dark urgency.

But since you asked

and the flower is already

half-unmasked by the morning

and the truth is only a voice away

from revealing itself,

and the hour scratches at the door

like a cat to be let in,

I will tell you

what the good and foolish never learn:

If you want to burn

like fire on the water

without going out

like a flame unwicked by the wind

that sins against it like a veil

it knots with nets of doubt

to gill the moon like shale,

you have to teach your demons how to sail.

PATRICK WHITE

TWO ROADS

TWO ROADS

Two roads diverged in a tongue of fire

and I rode the snake as the middle way

all the way up my spine

to the cold palace of the north star

that had gone out like the candles

of the old powers

that used to brighten

the dark towers of a free mind

to see if I could light it up again

by coiling myself like the fuse

of the last supernova

that will ever go off like a brain

to fire the darkness up again

like a dragon before rain

wounded by the lightning spears

of his own injurious stars.

I’m as sure as Sisyphus about things

and it’s difficult to always tell

whether I’m a fire-wielding snake with wings

or meatloaf in an eagle’s claw

ascending beak to jaw

into the heavens

like the farce of some cosmic law

that follows all my sevens like snake-eyes

whenever I blow on the dice

and pray for illuminated elevens.

My blood is tainted with the night.

My blood is an iron rooster

that crows at dusk

like a blind weathervane

in all directions

trying to wake the wind up

by breathing into the mouth of its cave

this fire that burns like a voice in a furnace.

No one likes a real dragon,

their eyes are too intense,

and few have mastered the grammar

to read their scales like books

that were revealed in a dream

long before the world woke up

to its own lies

and needed shallower eyes to see.

They move like the bell and bulk

of an irreversible solitude

swinging on a chain of thorns

that snarls like a saw at the root of things.

But the scourge of the sage is an enlightenment

that will find you like a jewel in the ashes

and pick you up and hold you in the light

of its own shining

like an eye darker than the night

you’ve been busily mining

with the pick-ax of the moon

in the slagheaps of a leftover ghost.

And you will hear

the distant ocean of being

roaring in your own ear

when you put your skull up to it

like the only shell you’re going to find

on this bitch of a moon

and listen to what still lives within.

So many waves with eyes and faces, its true,

and so many suns in so many drops of dew

and the constellations that arise

like stories and rumours about you

aren’t fixed; they’re beads of mercury

that bled out of a haemmoraging thermometer

when you drowned like a lifeboat

on the way to rescue yourself

in the squall of a your last dreamfever.

It’s true, there are so many ways

to become confused

about a clarity

that has no confusion or clarity in it

and feel like the crumb of a dream

that scratches your third eye into tears

hoping to wash yourself out of the seeing

so you can receive the whole world

with all its death and suffering and beauty

with all its sorrow and desire and longing

and the radiance of its aspirations

with all the terrible generosity of the abundance

that it unjustly squanders on some

even as it uses the ribs of a child

that are showing through

like crescent moons

as a calendar of famine,

so you can embrace

the world without distinction

in the midst of all its compassion and brutality

as all that’s left of you

after the great extinction.

PATRICK WHITE

MY EMOTIONS

MY EMOTIONS

My emotions are exiles in the wilderness

making cornerstones out of their bones

and my brain is a brittle loaf

of black, unleavened matter

I tried to break to feed the masses

but they have no appetite for night.

My body is a museum of foods

that people have forgotten how to eat

as the grave holds out its hand

for another charitable donation to the foodbank

that waits on manna from heaven

when it isn’t raining vipers.

I don’t know who the fuck I am.

I’m just this man who keeps happening

a blink out of time with his pulse

like a white guy in a black jazz band

who thinks he plays like everyone else.

PATRICK WHITE

DON'T GIVE A DAMN

DON’T GIVE A DAMN

Don’t give a damn. Sit here chain-smoking cigarettes, out of the box, wondering whatever became of me. Poetically-somnolent, stars encrusted in the corners of my eyes, as if they’d been out all night, panning for gold. Effulgent morning light making the dirt on the windows glow, but that’s the light’s business as mine is just sitting here letting things go if they want to. Keeping a coffee cup full. Wine of the bean. My favourite liquid eclipse. And this ghost of smoke, my affable familiar. Sometimes my solitude appalls me and I assume a multiplicity of forms just to keep from being alone, but this morning, I am refreshingly irrelevant throughout my own, unknown universe. I’m not a holdout in a holy war that doesn’t know it’s over. All that blood. All those poppies. Not everything washes off in the grave. And if I save your life, am I responsible for it? And if I don’t? Who will save mine? And when’s the last time you saw anyone rushing to the rescue of a lighthouse? Or swimming out against a rip tide of stars to save a drowning lifeboat? As the man said about enlightenment: all the gains of war are ruined by singing and dancing. It’s kind of cute. But I can think of darker joys than those that are derived like music out of defeat. And I am not idiot enough this morning to start dancing.

PATRICK WHITE

MOST OF MY MALE FRIENDS

MOST OF MY MALE FRIENDS

Most of my male friends

are addicted to but terrified of women.

Leaves on the wind,

they bitch like amateur sailors

about the sirens on the rocks

who overturned them

when their balls

weren’t ballast enough

to right the way the mast

they tied themselves to

was leaning into the song.

Wounded and groaning

on stretchers they’ve made of their sails,

as if all the radiance of the passion

had been snorted through counterfeit bills

and they were the only ones lied to

by the black holes

that roamed their blood like dragons

who lived on fire

before the lights went out for good

and the poppy’s flare for passion

turned out to be a flash in the pan

as the moon arrived like an ambulance,

an usher of blood,

to revive the urgency

like a junkie

who had o.d.’d

on his own meaning.

They come to me

like younger versions of an old vice

as if their hearts were gored

like the petals of a rose

on the horns of the moon

that tore them up like a loveletter

written in the scarlet alphabet

of a harlot’s blood

like lipstick on a mirror

when they looked into the lies

in her inebriated eyes

and kissed their own reflection.

They talk like prosecuting attorneys

about their scars as if the moon

would never again change phases

and pimping themselves up like king cobras

with a flare for the ladies

they suddenly die of stage fright

like the sexual flutes of snakecharmers

thrust into the spotlight of talent night in a snakepit

that hisses them off the stage.

I’m older, and people suppose

my passions are ashes by now

and my skull an urn

in the house of the dead

and if I burn, I burn

like a nightlight in a morgue

or a slow glacier unthawing

the lockets of the mammoths

that died in me like a species

when love was older and colder than it is now.

They imagine I’m wise

and the fool has been murdered enough in me

that there are starmaps in my eyes

that aren’t rigged like dice

when they ask without asking

for my advice.

So I stand there,

aloof from their presumptions

like a windmill in their way

and let them tilt at everything I say

like furious Don Quixotes poking poison pins

into the eyes of the black effigy

they wound to burn the butterfly

that put wings on their worms.

I listen to a litany

of arrogance, delusion, hatred, pain,

jealousy, fear, lies, violence, hope, despair,

confusion, willfulness, longing, lust

regret and vengeance,

as love rages like a mad miner

stricken by fool’s gold

to gouge out

the treacherous likeness

on the dark side

of the two-faced moon

they once adored like an asylum.

If I were a biologist I would say

the peduncle goes looking for itself

in the ensuing phylum

to avert extinction

unnaturally

after all it promised to die for.

And it makes me wonder

if people just fall in love with each other

to have someone to cry for

who can hold them up

like a sprinker on a lawn

and pimp their pillows

like pink flamingoes

when love is over, when love is gone

and the hose is left flailing helplessly

like a serpent caught by the tail.

This one the wounded mahdi,

the hidden imam

waiting to return

to his private holy war against women

like a full eclipse of the moon

arming himself with antidotes

and sacred toxins

to ambush another oasis

and that one swearing celibacy

in a hole in a desert

he shares with snakes and scorpions

that come and go like fevers

inflamed by the visions

of the tumescent obscenities

he spies through his keyhole of flesh

and aches religiously to desecrate.

And there are assassins in the shadows

making love as if

they’d taken out contracts on each other

and the one who shoots first is the worst

and the other, an angry necrophiliac

rejected by a corpse

that was killed by his jealousy.

And there are wasps

who burrow into the cheeks

of love’s apple

like words with stingers

waiting for someone to bite.

Unresolved pain hones itself into spite

and goes hooking for swans

with sybillant throats

in the moonlight

and looking for the meaning of it all

is like trying to figure out

what the fuck to say

over your own grave.

One set out searching for a northwest passage

and wound up marooned on an island

littered with the stones

of reckless lighthouses

who didn’t heed their own warnings

like red skies in the morning

and that one drowned

in his own sphericity

when he was thrown overboard

by a sadder theory

but it wasn’t the sea

that was unworthy of the sailor

though he says it was a woman

who let him down.

PATRICK WHITE