EXISTING UBIQUITOUSLY IN MULTIPLE UNIVERSES

for Pat Doyle

Existing ubiquitously in multiple universes

because it’s getting too hard

to suffer this one on my own.

Dark room.

Star globe.

Thunderstorm.

Goldfish.

I just received an updated e-mail

from a friend who hanged himself

this past Christmas

that began

let’s change the world together

but then the computer said

there was a decoding error in the url

and that’s where the message broke off.

If you stare long enough into the nothingness

all your inconceivables

become synchronistically believable.

What is a mind the measure of

if it isn’t the quantum foam of hyperspace

blowing worlds like the bubbles

of an infinite multiverse

where the impossibly probable

does and doesn’t exist

like the way you look at clouds.

I had a dream once

where I stood on a cosmic precipice

and looked out into the abyss

and space was full of eyes

looking back at me

and ever since then

I’ve realized

that the seeker only exists

because the seer is the seen.

Like the Sufi master said

you can only understand

the things you’ve been.

And I would add in the same breath

that being is seeing

born in the heart of the stars

and that this life

this death

are just metaphors

for the way we forget and remember them

as if we were seeing ourselves

when we look back at them in time

from the inside out.

Yesterday throws a light on tomorrow

as if it were already a thing of the past

which explains a post-dated e-mail from a dead friend

but not why it should end so absurdly

or why it was sent in the first place.

What could any fundamental paradigm

in this house of warped mirrors be

except a distortion of my own face

in a space time continuum

that imagines me

out of the sum of all my reflections

as if I existed like an entity in arrears

long before I showed up

as what appears before me tonight

like anybody’s guess

as far as I’m concerned.

In a place so full of masks and mirrors

it’s hard to hold on to your lack of identity

like a passport to unknown worlds

when you’re the only witness.

No stars

except the stain-glass mobiles

hanging from the dirty windows

but there are beads of rain

enmeshed in the window screen

like jewels in the weave of Indra’s net

and they’re all marked

like a thousand tiny logos

from the Bank of Nova Scotia sign across the street.

A thousand eyes.

A thousand drops of water.

The tears of a thousand mirrors

created in the image of everything.

And when they’re all gone

what is it that disappears like my buddy Pat?

The bank of Nova Scotia sign across the street?

Or me

like someone I have yet to meet?

Cosmology or cosmetics on a clown

trying to run himself to ground

because in one world

he’s afraid to go to sleep

and in the next he never wakes up?

Does the rain remember everything it reflects

like mugshots of the usual suspects?

Does it dream of things in the tongues

of dead languages

like the forgotten grammar of chaos

and wake to the echoes of the voice

that talks to it in its sleep?

I’m tired.

I’m scared.

I could weep.

I’m at a crossroads

at the end of a cul de sac.

I’ve been uprooted like a weed

and thrown on a compost heap.

My mind is mulch

on a garden that doesn’t bloom.

I’m watering dandelions on the moon.

Whence comes victory and the help of God?

Or am I only a poet possessed

who wanders into every valley

where his hands forget what his mouth said

chasing exotic metaphors

for the incomparability of the multiverse

to anything in existence?

The fruits of a lifetime of labour

nothing but fossils?

I need a new assessment

of what it is I think I’m trying to do.

I thought I was leading disparate elements

out of this desert of insights

into the oxymoronic bondage of enlightenment

that sets things free for good

to celebrate their own human divinity

without having to give up their solitude

for a redundant union with God.

I’ve always thought the mystic

was the most vulnerable part of me

but now I’m beginning to see

it’s a false spiritual clarity

that’s the bigger threat

and I’ve gone back to trusting my eyes.

And what do I see

that’s at least honest

even if it isn’t very uplifting?

I see how the greatest achievement

of my existence

was being there to witness it.

To watch the dust gather on my blue starglobe

with its archaic constellations

like paper cut-outs

a kid would paste on the walls of his room.

To look at the crystal star clusters

dripping like mobiles from the window

and see how much the rain is like them.

And how the mind which brings things together

like infinite similitudes

out of the incoherence of their dissimilarities

so that people fall in love

and the planets stay in their orbits

and good people inoculate voodoo dolls

with the blessings of an antidote

like victims of the curse they’re spreading.

How the mind

which brings all this together

like an Arctic mirage of an iceberg

to the cosmic hallucination

of a lifeboat sinking in a desert of stars

is the loneliest of witnesses without a metaphor

when it looks for a face in the mirror

and all there is the endless space

in which everything happens

because it isn’t there to be noticed

though it’s what makes the difference

in everything we see.

I see how the mind

is empowered by its own impotence

like I am

to look for cornerstones in an avalanche

Ionian pillars among the asteroids

like a higher branch of learning.

I see how the mind is not set apart

from the blood in my heart

or the crescent moons of my toenails.

How breath and water and stars

and birds lifting off the lake

like the birth of rain

are all just vapours of a dream

in a mirror

that can’t wake up without me.

Gusts of stars

like gold-dust flowing down

from the world mountain

into the valleys and mindstreams

of the sleepwalkers below

panning for insights

that might shine a light

on the poverty of what they already know.

Chaos is the life of order

and order is the replication

of its own unpredictability.

Prometheus is liberated by his own chains.

Bodhisattvas are imprisoned by their freedom.

The grail goes looking for the ailing kingdom

and finds it as spontaneously as rain.

There’s no identity

to the endless variety

of a creative imagination in pain.

There is suffering

but no one suffers.

There is death

but no one dies.

The most intimate details of life

are cosmic laws

that are as inherent as pyramids

in the mystic specificity of every grain

as if everything

were the cornerstone

of the afterlife

of everything else.

You cut a witching wand

like a forked fractal

from a branch of the tree of knowledge

that begins like the letter Y

to go looking for the watershed

of the original design

and you end up divining

the meaning of the creative fever

that inspired you to search.

When the Zen master said

just regard the extreme chaos

of conditioned consciousness

he was talking about Nazis

goose-stepping their way

through the rubble of Berlin.

He was talking about chaos

failing with the highest grade-point average

in the graduating class

of a traditional military academy.

Form is a function of its own unpredictability.

Intensify the one

and you shorten the odds

in favour of the other.

You can see the immensity

and power of the sun

in the opening of the smallest flower

and the far sightedness of the most distant star

in the wavelengths of light

that inspired the eye to look

back into time and space

when the grammar of chaos

was the muse

of every sentence in the book

in an endless encyclopedia of beginnings

each of which evolved

like genomic alphabets

into the cosmic expression

of a work in progress

that always ends in a prelude.

But syllables are such a meagre way

of expressing what’s unsayable about life.

Like the gesture of an unfinished e-mail

that suggested we change the world

like the urgent imperative of an optimist

on the verge of suicide.

Homage to the ghosts that empower us Pat

and to yours in particular.

But it’s hard to imagine

sticking your head like a key

through the eye of the needle

whenever a lifeline

ties a noose in at the end

of an umbilical cord

is going to do much in the way

of bringing heaven down to earth

like a kite you can reel in

without getting hung up in the power lines.

And may the muse of inspirations that last

bless the poet who said

All things change when we do.

The first word ah blossoms into all others

and they’re all true.

And eventually the lies are too.

And maybe that’s why

you didn’t finish the e-mail.

Did death make you realize

as it does all of us at last

that you don’t have to hate something

to change it?

That what we don’t know

isn’t the probable cause

of our estrangement?

That the quickest way to end it

is to befriend it

like an unnamed road we made

of all the shortcuts we’ve ever taken home?

PATRICK WHITE

PUT MY FIST THROUGH A WINDOW AT SEVEN

Put my fist through a window at seven because the door didn’t open in time. A nugget of rage. A Martian meteor with signs of extraplanetary life I couldn’t return to. An angry child whose innocence was already a broken action hero before he received it like a second-hand toy. My sisters played with eyeless dolls. I looked upon the future like a starless telescope and the present like a dangerous doorway you had to steel your fear to walk past. No one could afford a history of their own so they lied to each other communally about making it in the world alone without any help from the rest of the family. Squalor and mystery. Stars at night out in the rough broom fields around Heartbreak Hill where I went to read John Keats alone about a thing of beauty being a joy forever and deepen the homesickness of a child in exile by gaping all night at the incorruptible stars before I returned to the broken windows and punched-out plaster of a forsaken moon without an atmosphere. A thing of beauty may be a joy forever but the severe joys of that neighbourhood made ugly perversities out of the waste of their humanity like a caste system of untouchables who embraced a thing of beauty until it was as despised as they were. Virgins yearning to join the hooker colonies of utopian pimps selling Shangri Las and Jonestowns up and down the street. Sex shouldn’t have to spend more time standing on its feet than lying on its back but if you didn’t show up for the nightshift you didn’t eat and there was nowhere a woman could take a bath in her own grave to renew her virginity where someone wouldn’t walk in and stab her like a female Marat for betraying their reign of terror. I keep returning to the misery of those days in an abortive attempt to love my childhood retroactively but the damage that was done was as thorough as it is implacable. Drunks at the backdoor. Junkies at the window. Lepers in the living room. Vipers raping roses with sump-pump syringes full of angry toxins because they both had thorns in common with the moon and when you flagged them they all haemorrhaged the same way. It’s one thing to get off on the pharmaceutical rush of strewing the path to death with bruised flowers in a coma but there’s nothing very brave about a whole new world that hath such creatures in it when you go through a withdrawal from life like a cult of one intent on sacred suicide. The rich adapt to what they’ve stolen but the poor left to their own resources mutate. I saw one man belly-flop from an attic window onto a picket gate. Meat on a fork. And another walk out into the ocean with diving weights and an empty aqualung like the shell casing of a spent round on the bottom of the seabed. And still another who upheld his right not to live by shooting his wife to death because she ignored him in her sleep after a drunken brawl. I always wondered if the dead die in their dreams if they don’t wake up in time to know they’ve just been killed. You can look upon your afterlife as the Greeks did as the gibbering shadow of this one or you can turn the light around and see this as the happy prelude to everything that’s gone for good. Or sitting precipitously alone on the rocky ledge of a hanging prison you can study comparative mythology with superstitious stars in your solitude as if you like them had raised your radiance above the atrocity of it all and no one could lay a finger on you here where the ghosts had long been liberated from the bones of their capital offenses. Nothing demeans the stars in the eyes of a child who looks up at them like a cellophane snail sticky with dirt. They diminish the hurt somehow but not getting involved in what they portend. And the message is clear. Not muddled in the curdled starmud of an astronomical catastrophe like thermophilic bacteria deep in the diamond-mines of the earth waiting like a default program to restore life to the planet every time it crashes. The bottom feeders know more about resurrection than the blue whales skimming krill. Lazarus raised from the dead like road kill. The reek of crushed frogs in rain-flavoured eclipses of oil seeping into your nostrils like prehistoric air from a manufactured jungle.

The intermittent innocence of growing up by the time you’re seven. Or you perish in exotic ways that only baby turtles that have been the subject of a national geographic wildlife film can fully understand. Or people harvesting garbage-cans. The shock and awe of savage circumstance. The slash and burn approach of bad karma catching up to small pockets of unencountered cannibals living in the way of the bigger pockets of progress. It was less painful to see what I lacked than to take account of what I had going on for me. There are the masterpieces. And these chalk outlines of the bodies of the rest lying on the sidewalk are folk art. And when God ran for election in our neighbourhood one year my mother sold me like a vote to a church that taught me to feel guilty if I dared to aspire any higher than zero. Consider how many children there are in the world where zero is the zenith of optimism. Ask any mirror decent enough to be vaguely disturbed and they’ll tell you about all the clear-eyed children who come before them like poor people into a clean room and looking around at how immaculate and tasteful everything is feel as out of place as the only smudge in space with a human face.

And you who have so much. Who are cuddled like new moons in the inherited fullness of prosperity. Who can afford the extreme frivolity of your desires. Who can recruit celebrity choirs in the war against poverty to write anthems for the poor that drown out their crying in middle-class raptures of how beautiful it is to be trying. Let them eat spam. Let them eat shit. Keep a lid on the garbage-can. And don’t stop to train the wildlife through your power windows to take food from your hand. Hampers at Christmas are enough. Or too much if William Blake is right. And to you who take so many wheatfields and rice-paddies out of the mouths of the disquieted children and give back just enough to have a stained-glass window named after you in a hilariously prosperous church I say you probably don’t remember who Talleyrand was, but the peasant in Napoleon got it right when he said of him as I say of you he was nothing but shit in a silk stocking. Except you’re not as smart as he was because your arrogance has made you stupid. He could see what was coming in time to change the colour of his socks to match the floral cravat of his festering fleur de lis. He buried his corpses secretly at night in the catacombs of politics but you step over yours like the rhetoric of the summa theologica for the rich on cable TV. The exonerative pundit of your own loveless obscenity. The stone is turned over. The worms are exposed. All eight eyes of the spider in the corner who sucked the life out of the music like ripe semi-quavers doing bass runs on the strings of an acoustic guitar can be seen for the toxic succubus it is. A rich arachnid on the net with stagefright. And nothing but the biomass of violated butterflies and outraged killer bees for an audience. Have you heard what the snakes are singing in their mosh pits about the ladders in the boardrooms of the U.S. and Canada these days? Your days are numbered like a platinum hit. You’re a Mayan calendar that isn’t going to make it in time to see if your speculative projections on the future of market commodities rang true or not at the closing bell. Global warming isn’t just a function of the environment. Human nature can run a temperature as well. The obese dreamfevers of the overly surfeited have a nasty way of turning into the gastritic volcanoes of populist nightmares that have swallowed too much to find you credibly edible. The poor feel free to steal whatever they want knowing they’re parasites and petty thieves that will never be well known for feeding on their own but when you steal like a bank from the public you must be seen to keep up an appearance of injured injustice like Robin Hood. You forgot that. And a stitch in time isn’t going to save the other nine as your flying carpet unravels like a spider-web in a hurricane. No one knows better than Jerusalem what happens to your holy shrines when they’re occupied by money-changers inflating the price of candles and doves like lottery tickets taking a risk on love. And God’s lobbyist walks in the door like the U.S.S.R. And there’s a rush to dump the indulgences of the infallibly rich like counterfeit Confederate currency on the slave markets of the Ivory Coast or bargain basement antidotes past their expiry dates in Ethiopia. Go ask the prophetic skulls of your own headless ancestors what it means to drive the golden chariot of the sun king through the slums of people who sweat like diamonds in coalpits to provide you with a good enough living you can afford to squander the fruits of their labour on the prenuptials of a seventy million dollar wedding. And you shouldn’t smile so whitely when you’re on TV talking about your latest atrocity because we can all see the dental plans we don’t have and it fills us with rage that all we’ve got to smile back with are tight-lipped caramel-rippled cocaine teeth even the fairies won’t give you any cash for when you lay your head down at night on the rock of the world like a hard pillow it’s getting harder and harder to dream on.

What an abomination of man. What a distortion of woman. How many millions of years of evolution did you have to undo to stand in the doorway of death and deny a sick child a cure because your golfing buddies couldn’t afford the disease? Did Jesus take you aside after one of your political rallies and tell you despite what he said in public you can whip the poor anytime you please? Wage economic genocide against welfare mothers when your tax lawyer tells you poverty’s part of an international banking conspiracy to make the rich suffer. In my neighbourhood it was the closet cowards who put their boots the hardest to anyone who was already down. They wanted to make a heavy impression to disguise themselves as one of us. But they never quite got the subtle difference between brave and depraved and were eventually put down like fawning dogs with rabies. Look. You’ve got your ass covered. Your children’s teeth funerals summer vacations medical plans bail retirement funds divorce settlements and the mortgage is paid on three of your houses and even God would have to take it all the way to the Supreme Court if she ever accused you of anything. You’ve got lawyers and lobbyists and spin doctors like worms in everybody’s roses and there’s always enough viciousness in the world to support smallpox. So why do you go out of your way to come down from your mountaintop like an avalanche on the poor just because they didn’t have the same post-graduate advantages as you and learn to steal and manipulate and lie on as grand an institutional scale? Were you one of those gruesome kids when you were growing up who went out of their way to step on ants because you couldn’t empathize with the same struggle for survival as the rest of us? Go read Shakespeare’s ninety-fourth sonnet about those who have power to hurt but will do none if you really want to see what kind of a festering lily you’ve become. But I’m curious. I’m as big a student of inhuman nature as I am of my own. And I want you to tell me what it’s like. When precisely did you know the moment had come to give up passing yourself off as a butterfly and throwing your life like bad meat down a wishing well begin to live like a maggot in your own corpulence? Tapeworms against the poor because they don’t feed you enough to feel you have a vested self-interest in them? Listen to how loud and brawling you talk out against people who have no voices to speak up for them because they can’t afford the liars you can. That’s not cool man. That’s not groovy. You’re not going to get the girl in the movie that way to make up for not getting laid in highschool. Don’t be cruel to a heart that’s true. Remember that? Elvis never had to pay for sex the way you do like some dirty little boy still spying through the keyhole on his sister in the shower. You’ve got to sow your wild oats in the spring. That’s all part of agricultural husbandry brother. Or is it you love the plough the moon because you’re a farmer alright but one without any seeds? Are you trying to thresh before you sow? Does standing up against the downtrodden like a quisling scarecrow for the rich and powerful gratify your repressed sexual needs? Do you get off on turning people who haven’t got much against people who have nothing by lying about where their paycheck’s going as if poverty were a form of graft? And you’re the biggest pig at the table? Let them eat peanut butter and jam. Let them eat bananas. You who walk down marble corridors where they wax your reflection as hard as they do your shadow and think of the poor as dirty hallways you can clean up with hysterectomies and drug-tests you wouldn’t dare give your own son because you know what’s missing from the medicine cabinet as if pissing into a test-tube were more indictably remedial than pissing into the wind. You who sleep well tonight on soft pillows stuffed with the flightfeathers of other people’s dreams and don’t think a day is ever going to come when you wake up to their nightmares. You who would deny the birds last rites in your baptismal fountains and say God God God all day long like a crow in a pulpit as if a poor man saying rich rich rich all life long made him so and think that makes you holy enough to spit in the collection plate like a sign of hate from above. You who are too mesmerized by the blazing of your own blindness to realize that the darkness that falls like a nemetic shadow at the end of the day is always more disproportionately grotesque and intense than the inflated luminosity of the gigantism that casts it. You who don’t think that gangrene in the big toe of the global body politic isn’t going to go to your head like a guillotine and insist upon not attending to it like a spin doctor without a comment on what’s rotten in Denmark in the Congo in Somalia in Pakistan in Syria Iran Palestine Israel Louisiana Ottawa Arizona West Van Eritrea Darfur Tokyo and locally in the kitchen of the apartment next door two weeks before the next welfare check. You who walk upon the earth as if every step you took were the bright event horizon of a new threshold and like a false dawn that doesn’t make the flowers open or the birds sing never gives a thought to what you must look like to the homeless and hopeless making their cardboard beds over industrial heating grates in the middle of winter. You who are witness to people sleeping in the dangerous doorways of condemned buildings and the uninhabitable prospects of life in the ghettoes like abandoned landrovers on Mars trying to colonize a duststorm like a little land of their own and contend the slumlords and the captains of industry have it a lot worse than the serfs do. You who try to justify the neo-feudalism of free enterprise like a trickle-down theory of food supply and demand as if the poor were the public urinal of God and you were the salt who decided who sat where at the table and who begged for scraps like plaintive dogs under it. Have you forgotten so much of your own history you don’t know what comes next?

Even on the street we knew stupid would get you killed faster than evil.

PATRICK WHITE

OLD LOVERS IN THE REAR VIEW MIRROR

Old lovers in the rear view mirror

though things may be closer than they appear

you diminish us

when I see

what you’re not ashamed to be

the cunning and the greed

the unenlightened cynicism

the panicked arrogance

of everything you are not

afraid of being caught out in the open

like a fraud before God in a thunderstorm.

You come on like a lighthouse

but I liked you better

when you were barely a nightlight.

You talk like a lightning rod

with a new revelation

that’s going to save the world

but I can’t help feel

I’m listening

to the same old weathervane

that’s always been twisting in the wind

like a rooster without a big enough propeller

for take off.

You can’t be the clarion call

of the morning’s bugle boy

and still lay cosmic eggs.

What’s the difference

between being born

a sexy Anglo-Saxon hen

and wanting to make

a grand French entrance

dressed up as poultry

on William the Conqueror’s table?

You’re going to get eaten either way.

But I can remember when you

opened your legs like a tuning fork

that put everything in harmony

that was human and wrong and endearing about us

but by the way you walk now

I can tell

they’ve been broken like a wishbone

that didn’t come true.

And there’s a crack in your liberty bell

that can’t be fixed with superglue.

Once I was bewitched

by your spell-binding cosmetics

like a chameleon in front of a mirror

that never wore the same face twice.

But now I look into your eyes

and see white-out on the typos

in the spirit of the law

you follow to the letter

like a counterfeiter

in a game of scrabble.

I was diamond when you met me

but you treated me

like an uncarved block of marble

and you were Michelangelo

who could see what I could be

if I just let you chip away the rough parts

and I was happy to let you shape me any way

you thought you could

as long as you were pleased with the work.

But you couldn’t find a chisel strong enough

and it was always you that broke and ran

and me that ended up thawing

like a snowman

who thought he’d been too hard on you.

Now I see

you’re a palliated woodpecker

the bird of Mars

a jackhammer in a concrete relationship

that says it’s willing to die for you

like a Roman aqueduct falling

on the gladiola of your sword

if you ever break up.

After you slept with the jeweller

I had traded the rings off

for six large paintings

you asked me

if it was okay

after we broke up

if you melted them down

into a twisted symbol of us

you could wear around

like a mutant embryo on a necklace.

But I can remember

when I thought

you were the shape of the universe.

Never felt I belonged anywhere

as if I were living my life on the run

but I don’t know what from

and whenever

I think it might not be a place

but someone I belong to

like space belongs to time

I find myself being left behind

like a fingerprint

at the scene of the crime

as if I were a witness

to my own identity theft

called upon

to pick myself out of a line-up

of well-known shape shifters

with records the length of my arm.

And I hear you flew out

to tell my mother

what a clown I was

but she stood up for my womb rights

and said no

as long as she’s known me

I’ve been a brilliant idiot.

You can admire it or pity it

or learn to love it like an oxymoron

but my son makes a point

like a starmap

you can’t quite put your finger on.

Like a key to an unknown door

you’re never quite sure

you can afford to throw away

so you put it in a drawer

and let it stay

until you remember one day

what keys are for

when you’re dying in prison

of your own isolation

like a fish beside fresh water.

And then in an unexpected turn

of an impervious phrase

your event horizon

is no longer a cage

in need of a key

and your freedom

grows up to realize

that compassion is the fruit of insight

and how much you creatively owe

to everything you’ve abandoned.

Some hang on a cross.

Some hang on a key.

But I can remember hanging

on every word you said

as if you were some kind of female Jesus

whispering into the left ear of Lazarus

to come forth from the dead

and enjoy great sex.

And I remember the night we broke up

and you said

you were sick of trying to be famous

standing in my shadow

and I felt like some great evil failure of an eclipse

as you went on

telling me what was wrong with our relationship

like a swan in an oilslick.

And I honestly do hope the full moon

sheds your flightfeathers in clearer waters now

and your path to heaven is laid out for you like the Milky Way

and not the Road of Ghosts

with its sad autumn geese

bearing the souls of the dead southwest

and there’s still more creativity in your art

than there is in your name

because I remember a nobility of soul about you

that used to put me to shame.

A first magnitude dark star of savage superlatives

with the most paranoid heart

that ever killed her biggest fan

out of jealousy.

Shit happens.

I’m not all that bitter anymore.

The disease has given up looking for a cure.

The eagle doesn’t derive its personal myths

from the rumours of houseflies

and I still find

there are fewer lies

when I look into the eyes of a serpent

that there are in the startled stare

of a doe with stagefright

caught in the glare of the headlights

of the oncoming future

like the ghost of yesterday’s roadkill.

And I’ve learned to have

a lot more respect for my masks

than I used to

and let them go

like new moons and apple blossoms

with deep gratitude

for the pain of lost beauty

I embrace like a memory

I would rather be hurt by

than efface

from the taste of crazy wisdom

that has come to fruition in me

with the urgency

of an estranged loveletter

I’ve been writing ever since.

The way I read it

you’ve got to wince and cry a little

before your eyes can adjust to the light

and dream up a new alibi every night

to explain to the darkness

when it overwhelms you

whose tears those are

on the pillow beside you.

And as for the delusional nature of love

I’d rather think that love

was a super sensible iridescent soap bubble

blown out of a gust of time in hyperspace

like a crystal ball

that wasn’t too fanatical

about its sphericity

letting things take shape as they will

without keeping an eye on the future

as if it were something you could prophecy

without having to experience

than a diving bell

sightseeing the shipwrecks in hell

as if it had a navy

and I were first admiral

of all the mermaids in uniform.

But it would amuse you to know

how content I am more frequently

nacreously pearling grains of dirt

I took out of the burning eye of hell

into a succession of moonrises in an oyster-shell

as things have cooled down

since the early days

of our last attempt at a solar system

that wasn’t the center of the universe.

Have you heard

they’ve been looking for signs of life

in the saline seas

under the ice of Encelaudus

one of the fifty-six moons of Saturn?

I remember looking into your eyes

like the return address on a loveletter

that spelled things out

like a cosmologist on a seeing night

as clear as a telescope full of fireflies

wanting to make contact

with intelligent life on another planet

that was more conceivable

than the insight they had into this one.

And it’s sadder than a starless November sky sometimes

when I realize

I no longer need a muse

to ignite the wick in the inkwell

like serpent-fire up my spinal cord

to bend my mind and heart out of shape like

gravitational eyes in space

when it so evidently appears

by the way the light is distorted

in this hall of warped circus mirrors

called the mind

where everybody looks for enlightenment

as if it were the flipside

of blankly staring into an abyss of delusion

some were born

in the sterling image of God

and some

to a fucked-up imitation

of the image of Creation.

I no longer make a grailquest

of looking for the source of my illegitimacy

as if that were going to give

every misbegotten misshapen

bitch and bastard in the world

a better birthright

than the untouchable one

they already belong to.

On the hierarchical wheel of suffering and change

in the caste system of chaos

that preconditions the Buddhas

where everyone’s enlightened at birth

it’s the lower orders

rooted in decay

that bloom like waterlilies on the mindstream.

As if the earth

had something crucial to say to the stars

about the nature of life and love

they’ve been overlooking for lightyears

that receives the most attention

from extraterrestrial seers

with tears running from their eyes

like mirrors on the same wavelength

as the simulacrum of life they’re looking at.

Like a homeless addition knocking on a door

from inside the thirteenth house of the zodiac

on the wrong side of the tracks

from all those thresholds we had to leave behind

like the double-crossed children of the gods

denied the human divinity

of their cosmic heritage

on the stairs of an abandoned orphanage.

I can’t remember now

if we thought it would provide them

with a better future without us

than the extinction we were living

like the half-life of the radioactive isotope

of an undiscovered element

too unstable to found a life upon.

But I’ve never meant

any harm

to the living or the dead

I swear it

because I know

I’m fire-walking in a sacred place

full of stars and thorns and shattered mirrors

that still cut after all these years

like a crystal-nacht of chandeliers

that couldn’t quite keep up

with the constellations

they were trying to replace

with black market knock-offs

of theosophical swastikas

and racist armbands.

And it’s holy and quiet here

as if someone had died unconditionally

for something truer than love

and deeper than meaning

that wasn’t trying to set an example

by dying to live up to anything

you could follow like a logo on a running-shoe.

And it’s true

we’ve all gotten older

and probably pay more attention

to the candle holder

than the flame

or who lit what in the name of

the little we could see in the dark once

of what we were all convinced for awhile

was love with nothing to hide

from the blood brothers and sisters

we made like strong alloys of our solitude.

But the length of the shadow

isn’t a measure

of the intensity of the fire

that casts it.

And though dreams might pass away

the dreamers stay

lingering over old memories

they keep to themselves

like strangers around a fire

no mirage can put out

even though we’re up to our necks in it

because even among these phantoms of water

desire is the white phosphorus

of the inextinguishable radiance

in the glass eye of the diamond

that inspects the stars for flaws

and sees that everything worked out

perfectly for the best

when everything was allowed to break up

like one ancient continent

beside one whole ocean

like a fortune-cookie in love with a seashell

that didn’t get the message in time

to stop the new paradigm of things

from drifting apart

like species at variance

with the evolution of the heart

along individual fault-lines.

And as long as it’s been

since we last shared the same genome

I still look back in unaffected gratitude

to a time when

deserts woke up beside monsoons

like a sexy climate change

in the manic weather

that kept us together

in the early Jurassic

long before evolution

panicked like a seismic catastrophe

into a new food source

for gigantic warm-blooded dinosaurs

smart enough to wonder

if the distance between

the brains in their heads

and the brains in their tails

were the same distance

that could be measured

in the angelic flightfeathers

between them and us

as a direct function

of the demonic wingspan

of our scales.

Or as the homeless highway said

trying to explain the Grand Design

to a wandering river

drunk on the wine

of the Great Delirium

you’ve come a long way baby

but it wasn’t in a straight line.

PATRICK WHITE

I’M TIRED OF TALKING ABOUT ALL THE SHIT IN LIFE

for Deb

I’m tired of talking

about all the shit in life

without mentioning the flowers

that transform it into something beautiful.

I’m weary of trying to be irrelevant

so I can feel I belong

to something bigger than myself

that doesn’t make me feel small and wrong.

A train whistle.

A car alarm.

An ambulance on the far side of town.

Three arbiters of harm

but no nightbird singing for the joy of it

and I’m sick of being the poet

who is writing all of this down

by an open window

at three o’clock in the morning

listening to drunk lovers on the street

rage over which one cares the least.

Who’s the beauty.

Who’s the beast.

I’m lonelier than I’ve ever been

living in this abyss of a mind

that sheds its shadows like a snakepit

hissing like the background cosmic radiation

of a universe at the beginning of its afterlife.

But I’m handling it better

than I thought I could

at least for the moment

like a fish that used to swim through tears

learning to swim through glass.

I flatter my ass sometimes

by thinking I’ve grown wiser over the years

but it’s a crazy kind of wisdom

that makes me feel

as if my highest ideals

were making a fool of me

and all I can say is Let them.

I watch myself with wry amusement

getting older around the periphery

and I’m determined to age gracefully

without lying to myself

about being forever young.

I keep track of my face

like a sign of the weather inside

and I’m discovering new stars

through the cracks in the mirror

all the time.

Death can take what it wants

but I’m not going to give it up

as if it was his

not mine.

So I live as if I were ageless.

Unborn.

Undying.

And I look back upon my youth

as a bad dream that was as often

wounded by the truth

as it was healed by lying.

I was nurtured like a voodoo doll

on rooster blood and whiskey

without knowing who it was

they were casting the curse upon

and why

but when they crucified the angels

they stuck like pins in my eyes

to blind someone I’d never met

and had nothing against

I saw the first full eclipse of my heart

without any sunglasses on

and I began to cry like a chandelier

when its last lightbulb goes out

for all of us.

And you’d laugh at the little boy

who’s still trying to get a piece of me

behind my back after all these years

as if it were me

and not my old man

who was a bad father to myself

up to the age of seven

when he abandoned his four children

like a raging alibi he had to live up to

to explain his perpetual absence

as the best thing he could do for all of us

and he’s been perversely right ever since.

I’ve found more mercy in the darkness

than I ever have in the light.

There are hidden jewels in the ashes.

And though the heart may be soft coal

that glows in the fire

like an exhausted fable of human warmth

deep underground among the roots

of my radical upbringing

I’m still a diamond-mine

of adamantine insight

that keeps one eye on the stars

and the other on the darkness

just to keep things radiantly real

between the fireflies and the streetlamps

and the secret arsonists

with hearts as big as fire hydrants

trying to unionize my volunteer fire brigades.

I oscillate between compassion

and savage indignation

at the state of the world

it’s getting harder to assume I’m living in

like a wavelength of life

that’s learned how to shed its skin

like the cataracts of the old myths

that tried to paint what they saw

on my eyes

like flowers in the sky

on the lens of a refracting telescope

under house arrest

like the rest of the universe

for staining the absolutes

of a bad guess

with sunspots of relative knowledge.

But I still prefer

the spontaneous clarity of creative expression

to the nuclear urgency

of the grailquests going on

in the hadron colliders of science

trying to make a blackhole

disgorge its singularity

like a cosmic egg

that hatched in the belly of the serpent

and turning scales into feathers

gave birth to the endless origin

of a universe in the shape of an oxymoron

that roars like a dragon in its sleep.

And though I’m as enamoured of the stars

as I’ve always been

I have less of a tendency

to underestimate the creative potential

of a single match

in a cosmic mass of hydrogen

to explode like a Tunisian souk in the face

of an inflammable bureaucrat.

And as you can see

by the way I’m writing this to you

I’m still willing to whore the truth a little

for the sake of a good metaphor

but that’s a psychological hazard

of what I have to do

to live with my unlikeness

to stars and flowers

because I was created

in the image of a god

no one can know anything about

like a posthumous father who didn’t die in the war.

And just as you once said I would

I’ve destroyed a promising career in poetry

for the real thing

though I often wonder if that means

I’ll die alone in a crowded garret

like the tragic farce

of a literary cliche

trying to compare

the drool from my fountainmouth

to the dew in the dawn of a new day.

Now I spraybomb my poetic graffiti

on the sides of the empty boxcars

that pass for my train of thought

on the wrong side of the tracks as always

and when they’re sidelined

by a red light up ahead

I undo their couplings

like handcuffs and co-ordinate conjunctions

that belong to the cosmology of an old universe

that fell under its spell

like gravity and grammar once did

and free them like roads and rivers and mindstreams

to make their own way in the world

without turning my art into a weathervane

to ascertain

if the true meaning of madness

makes any sense at all to the sane.

And I don’t know why

after all these lightyears alone in the abyss

trying to make contact

when my heart reaches out

to someone like you

it’s always in an extraterrestrial language

that starts with the ambidextrous hieroglyph for love

as if that were the one-word native tongue

that says what can’t be said for most of us

and is the hardest of all to speak.

I’ve failed to grasp anything I ever sought

so I reversed it

and developed a talent for letting go.

I burned my starmaps

and let the seeking go on by itself

and forgot what I thought I was looking for.

Most of the time.

I may not be enlightened starmud

but you always had a way

of almost making me believe

you could see me shine.

And I hope I did.

And I really hope I did

because one of the worst things in life

is to love someone

and make your heart

the gatekeeper of the flowers

they’ve opened up in you

and not let them look upon their work

like an art that can only be mastered

by breaking your own timing and discipline.

If you get the inside out down to the last drop

the only way you can be sure of a cure

is if the grail is empty.

At least that’s what I used to tell myself

whenever I thought of you

and let the fire follow its own smoke to nowhere

as if that were a better place to be

than wherever I was at the time.

Like me tonight here

listening to the predictable emergencies

scream like banshees

at the windows of a dozy town

with only one funeral home

that’s been in the family for a century.

I hear the hushed whispers of the ushers of the dead

treading softly on plush carpets

to muffle any sound of life

that might wake the corpse up

as if they were escorting him to his seat

with flashlights in the dark

and telling him to enjoy the movie

he plays a bit part in

for the rest of his afterlife.

I don’t know why

this should make me angry

but it does.

And hearing you’re ill.

That your beauty is in jeopardy.

That all your butterflies

are learning to adapt to the darkness

like industrial soot

as your lucidity recedes

like a comet in passing

that doesn’t portend the beginning or the end

of anything the earth is overly concerned with.

Life and death issues that go on in the grass.

Tiny horizon events

with blackholes

in their frames of reference

as if some thief

just stole their portrait from the Louvre

where it used to hang

and discovering it wasn’t known enough to sell

dumped it like a black velvet painting

in a garbage can

that can’t tell an Andy Warhol from a Rembrandt

though the ants

live well off of both.

And what I don’t understand

is why nature is always smiling

like a pothead in harmony with everything

when the spider tears the wings off the butterfly

as if it were opening hatemail

and not a loveletter from God.

As if razor wire had been used

to make a dreamcatcher

and blood ran like roses down its thorns.

And all the mirrors in the room

were works in progress

in a house of horrors

that’s been gentrified

by flowers that bleed like glass

that’s learned to hold back its tears

like a watershed deep in this desert of stars

that weaves its magic carpets

out of the lifelines

that flow like the themes of lonely rivers

into the wavelengths

of great believers and deceivers like us.

When I think of what’s happening to you

I’m more convinced than ever

that mind is just a mirage

in a bag of water

with nine holes in it

keeping track of the time

like a waterclock

that never wakes us up in time

to get ready for life.

The moon beheads her own reflection

and dumps it like a goat skull

down the unreal waters of a wishing well

no one can drink from

when I imagine that even space

must be overwhelmed

by the intensity of your solitude

when you feel what your body is doing to you

is worse than any rapist

but it isn’t considered socially acceptable

to scream or haemorrhage in public

though your eyes accuse the gods of being liars.

I’ve never known what I had to say

until I’ve said it

because as Dogen Zenji pointed out to me

verbal expression is not thought.

Thought can be the alloy of image and sound

but it’s not elemental.

It wasn’t born

with the same potential

for picture-music that hydrogen was.

It’s a warm-up act for better voices

than the most exacting discipline of reason

could ever dream of having.

And besides

we were always sidereal enough

to realize that a straight line

is only an inexperienced curve

that hasn’t been given enough space and time

to bend its innocence like an arrow

to a flight path without a star map.

You were Deneb in the constellation of Leo

your birth sign.

I was the bad neighbourhood

of a rogue zodiac

born on the wrong side of the tracks

with a couple of houses missing

and homeless stars

with no myth of a return address

shacking up at the back of the rest

to hit up on their own shining

with no fear of arrest until the morning

when the sun rose like a wrecking ball

to tear down the building

like that house we lived in

where I first showed up on your threshold

they torn down and turned into a Giant Tiger parking lot.

Ten years since we’ve walked beside each other

but when I saw you the other day

and how tortured your body was

how shrunken and twisted

by the pain of the humiliation

and the outrage

of what has befallen you

as if Lyme disease

were one of the plagues of Egypt

and you were one of the lean kind

that followed the harvest

of the honey and wheat

your body used to be

like a second full moon in October on the wane

I didn’t see a scarecrow.

I saw a blue heron walking on the water

with a psychedelic cane

decorated in auroras of paisley

that shimmered like the northern lights

and I immediately saw

the hippie had not died in you

and though you were absurdly wounded

you still preferred chasing your visions

like waterbirds disappearing into the distance

off into the sidereal aloofness of a mysterious god

who keeps putting different faces

on the same namelessness

as if all the shadows and echoes of everything

in existence

were the sacred syllables

of the one voice that keeps calling out to all of us

as if we were all alone together in the same lifeboat

looking for a lighthouse in the fog.

And I didn’t think I was being cruel not to pity you

when you told me point blank

you were dying

and I understood your clarity

didn’t have enough time left

to commiserate with people who couldn’t handle it

and there weren’t enough gardens to go around

where the living could seek sanctuary from your fate

by closing the gate to their own.

In the unlikeliness of this life

that evaporates like an atmosphere

into the vastness

of every single breath we take

like a planet that isn’t massive enough to hold it

I’m glad we were lovers

and that among all the bills

and fights about nothing

and immense reconciliations

we got a chance to look at the stars together.

I remember you one night

bending over to pick wildflowers

at the side of the road

and your blonde hair

looked like the ghost of a willow

in the moonlight

and caught like a doe in the carlights

I saw a glimpse of life

that wasn’t so much eternal

as it was profoundly perennial

in the form of a woman

that went beyond beauty and love.

And I knew the flowers

knew more about it than I did.

I stood by the car

like a stranger watching

a sacred ritual he doesn’t belong to

and isn’t holy enough to disturb

as you filled your arms

with towers of blueweed

and plumes of white sweet clover.

And that smile on your face

as you walked back to the car

like a cover girl

that had just been airbrushed

by grace.

And though I didn’t fully understand it then

that jewel of a night

became a koan of insight

that has burned in me

like the eye of a dragon ever since.

And it doesn’t look through a glass darkly

into the terrifying immensities

and dwarfing transformations of life

as if the heart and the mind

were illegal immigrants

in a hostile universe

looking for a birthright to be.

And it’s not a crystal ball

without a past or a future

or a blackhole without an event horizon.

It’s not a gravitational lens

that bends the light

to its way of seeing.

No one’s put wings on it

like an orbiting telescope.

It’s not a third eye

or the holographic projection

of a pineal gland

painting pictures in space

to amuse the mind

and keep it from going mad.

I don’t know what it is

and it’s unlikely that I ever will

but it doesn’t look upon

the evanescent intensities

of human experience

with the severity of a dream

that nothing we do or say

can wake us up from.

It’s the clarity of the stars

that last summer

we ever looked upon them together

not as distant sources of light

but as a spiritual kind of weather

that only migrating birds know

and trees and flowers

letting go of their blossoms and leaves

and seraphic lions rising in the east

and two humans

stopping at the side of a country road together

to be silently astonished by the beauty of the night.

The starmud and the mystery.

It’s that softness of earthly light

that gathers around intangible things like form

as if it would protect them and keep them warm awhile

by wrapping them in one of its veils of lucidity like skin

that fits each of us

like our seeing fits our eyes.

Like our vision fits the stars.

Like our dreams fit our waking aspirations.

Like life fits the personal history

of the cosmic mystery

into every cell

of the most fallible of human hearts

like a summons to explore their lives

with courage and longing and wonder

like a message in a bottle from an island universe

we sent out like the light of a star a long time ago

like a loveletter we mailed to ourselves

in case we never got back this way

and someone were to ask where we went.

Or fireflies in a mason jar as big as space

wondering where all the light’s coming from.

Or love fits the shoreless ocean of awareness

into that teacup of insight

I had of you that night

and that wounded scythe of a smile

well-pleased with its harvest of flowers

turning into a question mark

by the time you got back to the car

as you wondered out loud

whether it would have been better

to leave them on their own.

I didn’t know what to answer then

but if you were to ask me now

I’d say every constellation

would be made an orphanage

of nameless lucidities

if someone like you

weren’t out gathering them up

like New England asters in the starfields

to make this cold palatial place

feel a little more like home.

And I’d point to the point

at the bottom of the question-mark

that makes up the head

of the sphinx that sits like Leo in a desert of stars

And I’d say

You see that?

That’s Deneb.

Do you see how

she answers her own question

like an exclamation mark making

a deep and gracious bow

like a woman bending

to pick flowers by the side of a road?

That’s a first magnitude star.

That’s a lion of compassion

that can kill you into life

without leaving a scar.

As above so below

that’s the totem of a woman I know

who could heal you like a hunter

who poured all her ferocity into love

like rainbow-flavoured psychedelic sunshine

like moonrise in a wishing well

that wasn’t the blood sacrifice of an Aztec skull

but a cross between a pearl and a rose

as if the universe were one big oyster shell

that didn’t treat people like dirt

it was trying to wash out of its immaculate third eye

because they were spiritually grubby and hurt.

That’s her star.

That’s her spirit.

That’s the fire of a feline avatar

who could see in the dark

how frightened and helpless people are

to open their eyes like her

and shine

and then showed them how to do it

as easily as the full moon moving into her sign

like the sail of a lifeboat

like morning glory on the vine

by the side of the road

into the great mystic bay of her heart

as if she were gathering flowers

by the armful.

She could draw blood

and sharpen her crescents on your psyche

but when you tasted the wound

you swore you were drinking wine

in a big busy kitchen

full of hungry misunderstood street kids

and hopelessly homeless poets

with Aphrodite.

PATRICK WHITE

LIFE’S NOT A STRUGGLE

Life’s not a struggle

it’s a lottery.

An improbable concourse of chance.

You can organize stars

into constellations

and adorn them with myth and meaning

and teach them what laws to obey

and what superstitions to ignore

but they’re still just a roll

of the eyes of the dice.

What was so lucid

within and without once

is now so twisted

with knots of pain

in the heartwood

the tree of the body

so ruined by disease

the roots and the branches

so gored and broken

no cross is more a token of suffering

than a human that has endured everything alone

like a battered pine at the edge of a precipice

that isn’t a threshold to anywhere

with an overview of the unknown

that’s brought it down in a storm

for no reason

other than it was there

to be destroyed.

And babies die in car accidents every day.

And millions are just left to starve to death.

And there are war crimes and atrocities so hideous

afflictions and catastrophes so absurd

ideologies so cold and indifferent

frost burns the rose of flesh and blood

and abstractions coagulate in the wound

like anti-matter practising pseudomorphosis

as if we were all changelings in the womb

born to this agony

in the name of nothing

that not even God or evolution

can remotely relate to as human.

A pain so old and deep

it’s devoid of ancestors

though anyone who’s ever lived

including the animals

has felt it as up close and intimately

as a scalpel at their jugular vein

in the hands of a psychopathic barber

doing surgery in the mirror

after he lost his license to practise

for not keeping his cool in a crisis.

Poor body.

Poor heart.

Poor mind.

Blind stars that shine

without knowing it

or what it is they illuminate like braille.

Nothing but signs symbols words.

Aviomancers of hidden nightbirds

in the sacred woods

that have been clear cut

like Druids on the Isle of Mona

by superstitiously liberated Romans

bringing civilization as a consolation for their greed

like a chainsaw to the pagans.

And then those

who fleeced the lamb

like the shepherds of man

looking over the fold like wolves.

What an abomination

has been made of so many afterlives

so a few infallible liars

could thrive well here

without waiting for their lies to come true.

But there is no judgment.

There is no karmic redress.

No feather in the scales

to weigh the goodness of the heart

that’s being torn apart by the jackals of death

like a baby rhino that’s wandered away from its mother.

Breathing is believing

and the only religion I know

that doesn’t offer you airmiles to Jonestown

or turn the wine at the wedding of Canaa

into black kool-aid

in a six pack at the back of the liquor store

is the one that encourages me to abhor it.

Life’s the ultimate infidel

when you understand

that there’s nothing holy about death.

That suffering doesn’t have a purpose

for each and everyone of us

as if pain were transcendent

and excruciation

a work in progress.

But you don’t get over something

by going under

is the most commonly ignored advice

among suicides

with their left hands cut off

and no place to be buried in the graveyard.

Things are so unbeautiful among us

that life has had to resort

to the art of horror

to keep the wonder and inspiration

of being here at all

alive in us like cattle-prods

in an abattoir.

Thick-skinned muses

and mermaids on the rocks

in wet suits

with aqualungs

trying to recall something alluring

that can tie like a hook

to a catchphrase

at the end of a two minute song.

Humans are winged serpents

with fangs for claws.

If they don’t kill you with wisdom

they’ll kill you with laws.

And the cure’s just a bagman

for the original disease

putting the squeeze on your mind.

Whatever way I characterize it

what do I know

in this nanosecond of a lifespan

among the shadows of the fireflies of insight

that I could spread out like a starmap

of the master plan

that could make me say

without laughing out loud

like an angry rude Chuang Tzu

beating on mushrooms with a bamboo rod

to bring them to enlightenment

the light of life in this one

is shining the right way

and in that one it’s gone out?

War is just cosmology with a body count.

People who have more faith in their ignorance

than they do the clarity of their courage

not to make everybody try to see and be

what isn’t there to stand for

when they kill.

I make a jewel of the emptiness

and turn it in the light.

And I see fat politicians and lobbyists

as corrupt as their own interests

talking about ensuring

the future of their middle-class children

and yours

by taking food and medicine

like budgets out of the mouths of the poor.

While the chronic goldrush of Wall Street

cashes in on the problematic prosperity

of class warfare.

The rich say to the poor

though shalt not have

as if water and food and shelter and peace

and cures and antidotes

schools and vaccines

were private possessions

and someone starts handing out AK-47’s

instead of wheat

and the poor go to war against the poor

to satisfy the supply and demand

of their military manufacturers.

You can blame this shit on God

for taking both sides at once

if you want to

or you can take to the ice

with a sense of justice

like a zebra with a whistle

but I took one look

at what there was to belong to

and took the long homeless path

of a spiritual refugee

whose only sense of direction is away.

Heaven isn’t a place of rest

when you live in a world like this.

It’s a state of exile

with the blessing of the abyss.

Ah how many loveletters to oblivion

have humans written

in the blood of the dove

with their return address on them

that have waited like weathervanes

for the breathless answer

that never came?

How many prayers pleas vows entreaties pledges deals

have we sent off into outer space

like digital images broadcast of us

to let someone know we’re alive

through radio telescopes

that can speak like us through their ears

and hear with their mouths at the same time

and not so much as the whisper of a wavelength back?

And yet we go on feathering the cosmic egg

like Quetzalcoatl

the plumed space serpent

who’ll make his blue-eyed return one day

if we crack enough skulls in his honour

bleed enough hearts

drink enough blood

eat enough death

to build an observatory on the mountain

to foretell our doom.

There wouldn’t be

a trace of life on earth

not a mammal

not a blade of grass

or even a habitable planet

if the sky hadn’t been falling into place

like a marble or a bullet

in the roulette wheel

of a navel in space

from the very beginning.

Life as we know it

owes as much to random catastrophe

as it does to the oceanic notion

of intelligent design.

What the watchmaker broke

when he wounded life with time

the watchmaker might repair

if he changes his mind

and stops acting teleologically

like a terrorist with an alarm clock.

Innocence is in a coma

and mercy can’t keep up with the shock

of revelation after revelation.

Beauty studies the aesthetics of desecration

in a cosmetic school for the liberal arts

and the inhumanity of man to man

opens a speechless university in Auschwitz

to study the terminal effects

of prolonged exposure

to the obscenity of bloodless politics

upholding the ancestral devotion

of fanatical houseflies and maggots

to the extermination of whole nations

because this one wears his heart on his sleeve

like the corpse of an Aryan pinwheel

washed ashore like the galactic waste

of a theosophical starfish

wearing a swastika the wrong way

to be creative

and this one a yellow star on his sleeve

like the only thing he’s got left to be true to

and wish upon

as he’s being dragged out of his doorway

in front of his children

by a frenzy of Nazi dogs

for lying about being human to his gods.

Show me something reasonable about rabies

and I’ll know you’re a life-form

that isn’t based on water.

You’ve got a silicone heart implant

like a microchip processor

with a binary pulse

that delights in flatlining

the old wavelength you shed like a snake

inching out of your humanity like a used condom

to be worthy of the obelisks

they erect

in Times Square

to the kind of prick you are.

Recurring nightmares of hatred and suffering

with designer logos on their arms

like Jungian symbols of their psyches

trying to express new ideas

for a unified field theory

to a corporate universe

in an executive bathroom

where trickle-down economics

is a way to relieve yourself of the poor

by letting your excretions run down your leg

until even the princes of the palace

come to your table like hunting dogs

and beg.

Have you noticed in life

how the selfishly insufficient

never find sufficiency enough?

To be accurately graphic about it

they’re gnawed on by their own appetites

like tapeworms with flesh-eating disease

trying to balance the budget

by sending Chicken Little out

to convince the poor

they have to stop eating

for the good of the economy

and the future of their children’s welfare.

But you don’t have to be Merlin to see

into the available dimensions

and inconceivable abysses of what’s to be.

Want and misery and savage indignation

watching a degree of pornographic luxury

mudwrestling in the filth of their wealth

like sumo wrestlers on cable tv

that threatens to cut

the bread and circuses off

like an umbilical cord to a corpse

if they don’t keep up with the costs

of sustaining a coma.

And they see by comparative mythology

through a veil of pixels

the ruse of greed

behind the party mask

the rich wear like a mirage of water

in a desert

that wealth is just another alibi for evil

whose worst mistake

was riding in a golden chariot

through a slum

as if it forgot

it were less than human.

Why should one man’s tumour

be removed with a golden scalpel for free

and another human be cut from theirs

like a budget in the hands of a chainsaw

as if they were what was carcinogenic

about the problem?

And o come on now

who really thinks

you can live long and happy lives

like butterflies

yachting on the honey

in the hives of killer bees?

Or that militant materiality

flexing its influence

like a finger it gives to the mob

like a ballsy pedagogue

isn’t going to have its dick cut off

as a lesson in how to conduct yourself

when you’re in other people’s living rooms

and you don’t take your lifestyle off

as a sign of respect for the dead.

How can a fixed casino

ever understand

the underlying reality

of a ripped lottery ticket

that sticks it to the poor

by giving them a chance

to become a whore in advance

of anything they could have wished for

and then laughs in their face

at what a fool they were

for playing the odds

when all the evens were missing?

Evolution didn’t hold any genes back

like a pharmaceutical company

in the growth of our species

or an ideologue cloning his image

like the racial politics of stem-cell research

in the DNA of his agenda

for a whiter tomorrow.

If you don’t want to fall victim

to the spread of your own disease

it’s obvious you share the cure with everyone.

Wheat.

Rice.

Roof.

Water.

Well.

Road.

School.

Hospital.

Choice.

Word.

Justice.

You don’t have to apply for a research grant

to look very far for the cure.

You just have to dip the other wing of the fly

in the milk and honey

of the promised land

if you don’t want to be tainted by the side-effects

of being the bad meat

that gets thrown down the well.

How often have you said to yourself

you’ve got to keep the blackflies sweet

or they’ll turn into the erinyes of Hades

or the banshees of Celtic hell

and pursue you like ice-cream

to the ends of the earth?

When wealth puts a noose of bling

around the neck of blindfolded justice

standing on a footstool

the golden rule rises up

and murders Midas

for being a touch too much

for the unradiant ore

of the labouring poor

to stomach.

Gigantic spiders

out of all proportion to their webs

dripping with wealth

that’s tearing like

the lifelines hanging from their necks

under the weight

of their massive corporate bodies.

Time has run out of demand

like sand

in the thorax

of the trophy hourglass

that declared this pyramid

with its gold capstone

a winner with an afterlife

and all the runner-ups

in the rest of the competitive world

losers sitting like dunces

in the corners of quicksand

doomed to be forgotten

like the lifespan of a bad movie.

The hour has well past

when the rich can sleep comfortably

with the daughters of the poor

while their mothers clean house

and feel assured

they can still afford

the same delusion they did yesterday.

Gold is purified in fire

when sunspots begin to show.

It’s poured down the throat

of the Roman billionaire

who killed Spartacus

like a vainglorious swan of a man

being waterboarded in Iran

like the Islamic version

of anachronistic anti-matter

in the eyes of Allah

who doesn’t let a bad metaphor off the hook

all that easily.

You can bet your book on it.

You can’t talk like a peacock in a depression

and not expect the world mountain

to come down on you

like an avalanche

that walks the walk

all the way to the bottom

of the valley of death you dug for yourself

with that silver spoon of a tongue

you were born with up your ass.

Don’t piss on the sherpas

as if they were of a lower class

when you’re trying to climb Mt. Everest

and the only thing you’ve got to rely on

to make it to the top

is a starmap in the wormhole

of a large intestine

to give you a sense of direction

of the final outcome of your affairs.

And if I sound prejudiced in this

then I declare

I am prejudiced against the poor

being condemned by law-abiding thieves

to endure their lives

like a minimalist painting

where less is more

except if you’re rich

like a lamp without a genie

that doesn’t want to know

once the election is over

what you wished for.

Most politicians are kites

not birds on a powerline

who run for high office

with their spinal cords

in the hands

of conglomerate oligarchs

who fly them in elections

like lost leaders

in a department store window

to get you in the door

of a political arena

where they do unto the poor

what they’ve always done for fun

to people in a Coliseum

who either fall victim

like meat to the lions

or murder their own

to win their freedom

like a wooden sword

that was too much of a heavy lift

to be crucified on.

What a squeal goes up for justice

when the rich steal from the rich

but if a rich man steals from the poor

he’s considered fit for political office.

He knows how to cause suffering.

He knows how to deny a child

a heart transplant

because he know how it feels

to grow up without one

and as hard as it is to overcome

the bloodless blackhole of a heart

that’s imploded on itself

out of the sheer moral exhaustion

of transcending your lack of humanity

by letting what isn’t in you out

to cannibalize yourself

your family

and everyone else

look what it did for him

and then look at what he did to us.

PATRICK WHITE