SAFE, EDUCATED WITNESS

SAFE, EDUCATED WITNESS

Safe, educated witness to bestial scenes

since I was born, the destruction of cities

and species, and helpless human beings

severed from their limbs like pruned branches

too close to the borders of warring powerlines,

whole families massacred like icons

in a video game by a real soldier

whose delusion wasn’t the same,

the blood-spatter of children

freaking the flower, I

loathe the indifference

of the one-eyed watchers

who look on impotently

like hardened gum

under their bomb-proof desks

weighing the risks for both sides

of unbalancing their covert genocides

like a second set of books of the dead.

Perverts blowing kisses like artillery shells

to children in their beds

who scream like murdered bells

and windfalls of deathheads,

billiard balls, and tiny skulls

that broke to start the game.

I thought I was a lucky man

to be born in the land of plenty,

and the cupboard is full

but my heart is an age beyond empty

and my spirit is savaged

by disgust and shame,

and under every pellucid, abstract thought,

laying itself down like money

at an ideological dogfight,

an abyss of bones

where the children rot

like the memory cards

of disconnected cellphones.

I listen to myself, I listen

to the distinguished commentators

and the primed-time spin doctors

passing out motorized walkers

like miracles for the mentally lame

and renewable treaties

for the kingdom to come

that fits over the head

of the planet now

like the used atmosphere

of a discharged condom.

Hell seems quaint by comparison

with the agony and the torment of here

where the natural, untaught decency of a human

is accosted by the atrocities

of a loveless heart

hooking the lives of children

on inverted question-marks

like flayed cattle in an avant-garde abbatoir of bad art

as everyone subscribes to the New York Times

to keep up with the latest alibis

to expurgate the mess

of regurgitated crimes

that aligns our vomit

to the wines of progress.

And everyone feels what they say

as if God sat in their corner

like a fool on a stool,

but no one ever says what they feel

when the heel crushes the head of a child

like a grape

and her sister is hauled away

like a voodoo doll at a gang rape.

Who caters the flesh feast

at these laden tables

of fat, old, impotent, girdled men

arriving in limousines

to discuss discussing a resolution

to put an end to a child’s screams?

Summoned like vampiric thorns

to the bloodbank of a rose

that bleeds like a child or the sea

everyone opposes saving the roses

until they can be arranged

like body parts and ashes

in the funeral vase of a policy

that crashes like a junkie

at the mention of withdrawal.

O mighty world

who eats the nations

like a pack of wild dogs a corpse,

necrophiliacs at a conference table

smearing make-up on the facts,

trying to turn their maggots into butterflies

by wrapping themselves in their flags

like the stars in the sky

and the waves of the sea

and squeezing the life

out of a child like striped toothpaste.

O vicious, pygmy abomination

you pricked your thumb

on the thorn of the crescent moon

when you reached out

to leech the blood of the rose

by crushing an army of four-year-olds.

O wild hog of runt-rage

goring the world

like a girl on your tusks,

it takes more than one star

to make a constellation

and a lot more than bloodshed

to school the eyes to see it

that look at you now

like children in terror,

the plinths of your shining,

sidereal teeth,

and the lonely myth

you drop like flyers over the city,

lip-service to a fraud without pity.

PATRICK WHITE

BRIGHT WINTER MORNING IN PERTH

BRIGHT WINTER MORNING IN PERTH

Bright winter morning in Perth.

My spirit is foraging on shadows

that have almost forgotten the forms

they elaborate, weaving

easy patterns in the snow

like a mind free enough not to know.

I can see whatever I want in them

as I leak out of things like a truant bloodstream

from a probationary heart

that knows wrong from the start

is just another day of playing it

right all the way.

As a man, as an artist,

I’ve put more faith in my living confusion

than I have in any dead certainty

left standing at the gate

of a mind where nobody’s home.

I am an old man on a mountain of my own

closer to the stars

than I am to the valleys

that wander like scars through their dreams,

though I don’t dream much anymore of anything

in the coldness and the clarity

of dreaming that I’m awake.

And I don’t think there’s anything to search for

that isn’t already leaning up against

that last, inner door

like a gift we’re often too afraid to open

because we already sense what’s inside

will grieve us with more happiness

than sorrow ever denied

or the vows of the fugitive bride

ever made meaningless

when she discovered her true love was change.

Life is transformation.

Life is a chameleonic constellation

that tries to second-guess

what we’re looking at

by growing eyes in our blood

that open the wider we do

to the spree of light

rooted in our starmud

whenever we come out of ourselves at night to shine.

Fire bloods the grail of the crimson moon

you raise like a fever to your lips

to say in a rave of flames

I love you,

and expend your effusion on ashes,

but when you love someone, anything

deeply enough the passion isn’t your own,

and the vision’s impossibly true,

the wine turns blue

and stars stream across

the celestial abyss in the lees of your eyes

that fulfills the legends of your shining

with skies that prophecise

by the flight of mantic birds

you created your own world,

in your own words

and there was room in it for everyone,

but didn’t sign it

before you hid it

where you could never find it. Because

(and it’s a big because from there to here)

you wanted to make it compassionately clear

perfection dances in delight

with its own flaws

like the delicate answers

to the club-footed laws

that try to lead

with painted starmaps of the light

following their own footprints all over the night

to see where they’re going

when even the silence of the most remote star

is the music of the intimate flowing

of the known into the unknowing

which is how the love of life

loses itself in the arms

of a life of love

like a seed in the sowing

everytime the heart goes hunting

to eat like a god.

PATRICK WHITE

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