CHILDHOOD’S NEVER OVER
Childhood’s never over.
It goes on evolving along with us
as if maturing had nothing to do
with growing up.
It’s what’s still creative about yesterday
that lives on inside us
like an ongoing work of art
whose finishing stroke of genius
was never to abandon it.
My childhood has the eyes of a homeless boy.
The eldest son of a single welfare mother
how could I not become a hero
to be worthy of her
who gave her life up for me?
Even the worthless can make noble mistakes
and if I started out tilting at windmills
the ironic absurdity
of my many-headed imagination
has long since turned me into
some kind of dragon voodoo doll
that keeps taking hits from the past
like a junkie trying to curse someone
by sticking pins in himself
as if his blood had eyes.
Who knows the fate
of the fatherless son
who’s been martyred
on the heartless altars
of maternal compassion?
I was middle-aged by the time I was seven years old.
I’m sure my mother never meant to raise this.
But there you go.
Things get out of control sometimes
like morning glory vines in a cedar hedge
after a forest fire.
Some people are the point of the sword.
Some are the edge.
Some grab the blade by the hilt
and then there are all those who bleed.
I played Russian roulette with the moon
to clarify my intensities
with Zen bullets
I held to my head like koans
that kept bouncing off my platinum skull
or went clean through
without touching any of my vital organs.
There’s a subtle ambiguity
about enlightenment
that makes it hard to distinguish
a great bodhisattva from a contract killer.
I’ve been watching myself for years now
like a C.I.A. drone
learning all my routines
and personal habits
waiting for the right moment
to make the perfect hit.
I can remember when I thought I was Zorro.
A Spitfire pilot over London in the autumn of 1940.
Born a recipient white-washed by gratitude
like a white picket fence
with a couple of palings missing
for everything from the shoes on my feet
to my next breath
I wanted to make a contribution
that was a liberating payback with interest
for all that we’d received
as a welfare family
living like economic gypsies
on the fringes of better things to come.
The slave wanted to buy his freedom
from the infernal kindness
of his economic masters
indulging themselves in charity
to live forgivably
with God’s obscene abundance.
If great oak trees from little acorns grow
and you can get Neils Bohr
out of a single atom
and there was even hope for me
way back then
when I was a switchblade
winning book awards
that alienated me strangely enough
not only from those who gave them out
like well-cut jewels
to a diamond in the rough
but baffled my more bituminous friends
into keeping their distance
as if intelligence
were an untouchable
in a criminal caste system.
I didn’t want to be someone
my mother had wasted her life for.
So much of what I am.
So much of what I’ve done.
So much of what I’ve not done.
Not much of a son
when I look at it through her eyes
and even less of an outcome
when I look at it through mine.
Things were supposed to come to fruition.
But they’ve proven to be all vine.
In my grailquest for redemption
I’ve followed the dark star of my intuition
like black wine
that delighted in leading me astray.
The rational disassociation of the sensibility
as Rimbaud used to say.
Method in your madness.
But that was yesterday
before the center did not hold
and things fell apart
as Yeats said they would.
Not that it does a lot of cosmic good
to know these things.
It’s hard to console a pteradactyl
by telling it why
the dinosaurs disappeared.
Everybody goes
with the evolutionary flow of their lifestreams
running downhill
to the big landfill
of their schemes and dreams
coming to a standstill
like the genes and memes
of a homesick Neanderthal.
They knew how to flintknap the moon
but they never learned
how to spin their delusions
like I did
in blood red ochre
on the wombwalls of a limestone cave
deep underground in southwest France.
It’s not so hard to be a hero
when there’s nothing to lose
and you don’t stand a chance.
Think about it.
We’re all given minds to express ourselves
and most of humanity
only says what it really means
when no one is listening
like Iago behind Othello’s back.
What kind of a play is that?
The actors keep their mouths shut.
The theme’s a re-run.
And the heroes
are all vicious petty
snakeoil salesmen
milking both fangs at once
like the crescents of the moon
to heal the last first
of all they have wounded
like a drug addict
in the realm of the Fisher King.
I may be as dark
as an oxymoronic anti-hero
blinded on the road to Damascus
by an improvised explosive device
that was wired like two snakes coupling
in the name of an unknown goat god
but at least I mean what I mean.
I don’t say the kingdom’s green
when it’s black.
I’m not a latter day Teresias.
The fix isn’t in on the prophecy.
I don’t look at two copulating snakes
and see a double helix.
I live in eclipse
like one of the real heretics.
I am the estranged genius
of my own genome
wholly at home
in my homelessness.
I have learned how to mutate.
To shape-shift my form
like an old Etruscan god
of zodiacal kings
where the river turns towards Rome
like the bloodline of a mad emperor into the arts.
I’m not trying to sell my story to the stars.
I don’t believe in lullabies that leave scars.
I don’t think there’s anything in the way of wealth
that’s worth asking for
that’s worth more
than the strength to stop asking
and the wisdom to ignore your own power
like an annoying habit
you’re trying to transcend
to be a bigger man
than the one you thought you were.
I wanted to be the kind of son
that turned all those floors
all those windows and tables
my mother had to scrub
for rich women in Lansdowne
into glass slippers
that fit her
like a shoe-shine Cinderella
with a prince of a reflection
for an eldest son.
I started out well enough that way.
But look what happened.
Someone once told me
the earth was a sphere
and so it is
if you’re rich enough
but if you keep falling off the edge of it
you know you’re poor.
You look at it
like an old starmap
that never goes out of date
like the full moon
of an empty dinner plate.
You know it’s flat.
And hope’s not much of a parachute
when it flowers
as if wishes were horses
and beggars could ride
because that’s the way
it insists with coercive intensity
things ought to be
and all in one voice
we all agree
to the same inane absurdity.
All the intellectuals
are trying to divine
the direction
of our mutual devolution
like an apocalyptic watershed
right under their feet
by reading the biography
of a best-selling mutant
they’re dying to meet
in a debate about creation
and misinformation
as the basis of reality.
And I may have been stubbed out
like a cigarette
or a big toe in a bad dream
on the stone of the earth
whenever I laid my head down
to forget who I was
more than a lifetime or two
because I was a slow learner
with a Mongolian tolerance for pain
but I’ve never blown a personal crisis
up into an astronomical catastrophe
that makes everything I think
the cosmic life
of a self-concious dinosaur
that went extinct upon impact.
I’ve never done that
though that doesn’t make me
much of a hero
in the eyes of my undoing.
A hero needs to act spontaneously
on the facts of the situation
through four consecutive acts
of tragic superstition
playing to the crowd.
I’ve got the scars
to say I’ve done my time
standing up in the arena
armed with nothing
but long odds against the Christians
but I’ve never learned how to scream
like a sestina
the way it says you’re supposed to
in all the rhyming dictionaries
that teach you to write
like a social form of etiquette
about things that made you fight for your life
like a lion-god with claws
the size of lunar crescents
that knows how to part your heart
as if the waters of the Red Sea
were nothing but a minor flesh wound
compared to how
you can be opened you up like Egypt
the moment you drop your guard.
Thieves in the pyramid!
Thieves in the pyramid!
Stealing my body of thought
like the tools to build
a better afterlife
than I was dreaming of
like the only way out of here.
Let’s hope there’s someone waiting
on the other side of the wall
between that freedom
and this prison
with a car
and new clothes
and a snakey mistress
that looks up
and smiles like a gun moll
then hisses and moves
like an anaconda
in black pantyhose
listening to rhythm and blues
on a police radio.
It may not be a cure for cancer.
But it’s my last answer
to those who ask me what
I’m doing here
checking my spiritual rear-view mirror
every few minutes of my getaway
like a return journey
I’m not going to make
back to Heartbreak Hill
like Sisyphus
on tour with the Rolling Stones
in the town where I grew up
watching my mother
try to make it through every month
as if she were trying to swim
the Straits of Juan de Fuca
like Marilyn Bell.
Hell is a seven year old boy
sitting at a kitchen table
like a broken toy
late into the night
listening to his exhausted mother
get the sorrow rage and despair
out of her system
like the venom of another day
by making two little Xs with a razorblade
and bleeding it out loud
as if you crossed your heart
and hoped to die
because even death was better
than living the way we did.
I’ve thrown a lot of snakes
without heads
in the fire ever since.
I’ve bruised them with my heel.
I was inspired by the views
of a Promethean thief
to introduce fire to the snakepit
that reached out to bite my mother
every day of her life
she couldn’t feel anything
but harm at the door of her heart
and dangerous shadows
under the windows into her soul.
Though sometimes
when the world had shut down for the night
I could see through the tears she tried to hold back
beautiful rainbow serpents
still swirling
like the Northern Lights
on the oilslick that overwhelmed her.
Even on her hands and knees
scrubbing the filth
off other people’s floors
she found a way to dance
the way she did before
the swan died on the lake
and she was hobbled by four kids
and a seven to five chance against
getting the next month’s rent.
She could have let go.
But she didn’t.
She hung on to her children
like a fatal mistake
she was deep enough to make
for love’s sake
in the middle of welfare hell
where night after night
staring at greasy walls
and torn linoleum
childhood never ends.
You just sit at the table forever
trying to pick the brighter bits
of broken chandeliers
out of the ice-storms
of your frozen tears.
And there’s so much you want to do
but you can’t
because you’re not God
and you’re not the genie in the lamp
you’re just a child
terrified of hope
thinking to yourself
some people cling to life
like a strong rope up to heaven
and others are barely hanging on by the thread
of the sword
dangling over their heads
like the brutal truth
of a debt to society
that’s always in arrears.
Looking back over the years
it gets easier to see
that if nature abhors a vacuum
then it doesn’t miss me
or the futile childhood clarity
of a social pariah
sitting at the table
like one of the four elements
my mother gave birth to
listening to the sound of humans
snapping like wishbones
that never came true.
PATRICK WHITE
