O LITTLE SISTER

O LITTLE SISTER

O little sister you’re an alley-cat alto-sax

howling on the fire escape

under a blue moon

that’s driven you into heat

just outside my window

for that arsonist boyfriend of yours

who used to puke in my potted geraniums

every time the two of you got drunk enough

to crash across my coffee-table laughing

even with each other for a crutch

you haven’t got a leg to stand on.

I was charmed by your romantic desolation.

I was intrigued by how much original sincerity

you both saw fit to squander on a cliche.

C’est la vie, c’est l’amor, c’est le guerre.

Elvis Presley is well and living in Tweed.

And Arthur Rimbaud is running guns

with Jim Morrison in Ethiopia for Al-Shabab.

Most people work harder at hope

than they do at achieving their downfall

and you were a fire hydrant

and now you haven’t got a hose.

No pun intended

I’ve known you too long

to see you this upended slurring your words

like the simultaneous translator

of an hourglass speaking

out of both sides of its mouth at once.

I don’t know why he left you.

Maybe there was nothing left to put out.

You burned out.

A piece flew off your heat shield upon re-entry.

Maybe any man who couldn’t hold his liquor

realizes sooner than later he couldn’t hold you.

I don’t know.

Go ask my geraniums.

They’ve got more to say about him than I do.

You make your death bed.

You got to die in it.

Next time build your house on stilts

in Stanthorpe Queensland

to keep the snakes away from your pillow.

What can I say?

He had a shoulder on his chip

that just couldn’t hold his end of the world up?

And don’t get me wrong.

I’m not laughing at your pain.

I don’t laugh at pain.

Pain is pain.

Different planets.

Different moons.

Who hasn’t gone swimming with dolphins

in the saturnine seas of Titan

or dropped a comet like a match

on a methane moon of Neptune?

Endomorphs and dopamines

can make you do a lot of funny things

that love is at a loss for words to justify.

Even if just for one wild night

of occult hunting magic

everyone longs to run with the wolves.

And howl, o little sister, you can hear them howling

in their blood agony at the waxing moon

as if something had died within them

that was so deep and crucial

it tore their hearts out

in an ecstasy of unrepentant pain.

And many many years later

when the solid abyss and hollowness of life

has grown even greater

you can still hear their voices

screaming like winter winds

above the timber-line

so high-pitched no echo

has ever been able to reach that high again

without shattering like a night bird

against the mirage of the open sky in the window.

Like you, little sister, now.

I’m not a sump-pump for anybody’s tears

not even my own

but I’ve been known

to throw a little heavy water

on a nuclear meltdown every now and again.

Pain. Separation. Loss. Dream death

you keep reliving like an afterlife in your sleep

you’re dying to wake up from

like a coma that’s lost everything worth waking up to.

Not two. Not two. Not two.

That’s the way it is here.

That’s as far as words go.

That’s where Statius takes over

from Vergil on the nightshift

and the stars nod off like children

who couldn’t finish the story

and the quality of the poetry drops

as dark genius opts out

of the company of bright mediocrities

trying too hard to make it a better world

than it needs to be.

For things it didn’t do.

And in a merciful world

that lived up to its teachings

and didn’t shrink the heart

with fear of its own extremes

while everything else is expanding

shouldn’t be asked to suffer like a placebo

in the glands of spurious cure.

And, yes, I know sometimes

it’s hard to keep up with the mysteries

like the elements of life on a geometric scale.

How many jugulars does a woman have

for someone to cut

like the downed powerlines

of the Medusa’s head

for having cast the first stone at herself?

You can wake the serpent fire

at the base of your spine

just above your coccyx

the hardest bone in your body

the little throne

the modest gravestone

you’ll be resurrected on

when you’re summoned from the dead,

but you can’t train love

to bite the people you want it too

and run like an antidote to the rescue.

That’s why you’re getting high

on your own poison right now.

That’s why your drunken tears

oscillate between a broken chandelier

that’s bleeding out

and acid rain that burns like love

congealing into a new ice age.

However deep you dig the grave

to bury someone you once really loved

even a desert at night

when the stars weren’t looking

wouldn’t be enough to fill it in.

It’s a wound without scar tissue

for the rest of your life.

The ghosts keep being pulled out of the box

like that kleenex you keep using

to dry your eyes at this seance

you’ve called on the spur of the moment

to be appalled by how lonely it is

to plead with the dead for severance.

PATRICK WHITE

CHEWING ON MEMORIES LIKE BROKEN MIRRORS IN HER SLEEP

CHEWING ON MEMORIES LIKE BROKEN MIRRORS IN HER SLEEP

Chewing on memories like broken mirrors in her sleep

tears of blood run from her eyes.

She doesn’t know I’m watching

but I’ve got windows everywhere.

But for her

just for her

because nobody else cares

third eye satellites with unlimited airspace

in her choice of skies to match her eyes.

A haemorrhage of sunsets.

Fly little bird fly

as if you weren’t the shattered sparrow

God took his eye off

when you fell.

Sometimes the mystic oversights

have more to say

about the great revelations of the world

than all the burning bushes in the valley of Tuwa.

Rumours and news.

Fly little bird fly.

Be an apostate waterbird

and let your skull skip out over the lake

like the moon through a glass house

that’s been asking for it for years.

There must be stars

that haven’t bloomed yet

somewhere in the corner of a leftover garden

that no one’s trampled on

like moon rocks

on a firewalk with a spoon

that hisses like the head of a viper

boiling with venom

at the tip of the tongue of a Zippo lighter.

Fly little bird fly

into a state of grace

that isn’t tainted by your experience

of the taste of humanity

that threw you like bad meat

down your own wishing well.

How they pried your innocence out of you

like a flower before it was ready to open

like a keepsake from a locket

your mother gave to you on her death bed

like a silver bullet that would keep you safe

from the grave robbers

the moment you used it on yourself.

Fly little bird fly.

I don’t know why

people attach more of an emergency

to the exit

than they do to the entrance

but I guess you’d have to ask a junkie about that

who’s used to coming in through the back door

with a ticket to ride

that’s better than a forged passport

to Disneyland

after you’ve done business with the Pentagon.

Fly little bird fly.

Don’t lose your nerve for enlightenment.

There’s the Bodhi tree.

There’s Venus in the dawn.

And there’s all this emptiness.

Isn’t it sweeter

than a hot fix

once you’ve gone beyond

the last judgment between right and wrong

like the pick up sticks of the I Ching

into the nirvanic bliss

of discovering nothing

was your best guess after all?

Fly little bird fly.

Disappear into your own eyes

like a candle

that’s stopped sticking its tongue out at the darkness

looking for a new place to hit.

Fly little bird fly

as if you weren’t tarred and feathered like Icarus.

And may the sun that shines at midnight

find you a lot more approachable

than apple blossoms

scattered like ashes on the wind

or fireflies that can’t hold their fixed positions

like the stars.

O it’s so anatomically true

that life on earth hurts

especially when you’ve fallen

out of love with love

like a baby out of the nest of a lullaby.

Down will come baby

shaman and all.

I see your bruised body on the bed

like the embryo of some past miscarriage

that taught you how flesh

can grieve for its own death

while it’s still alive.

I see the black haloes.

I see the bright horns.

I see the butterfly feelers

that have burnt out

like the short-lived filaments

of your average light bulb

and the place where you were anointed

with holy oil that hissed.

And it’s hard to miss where the apple sat

when William Burroughs

shot you through the head

pretending he was William Tel

like your crackhead boyfriend did last night.

Luckily he missed your heart.

He should have hired a firing squad

instead of relying on a sniper.

You don’t send a single viper

to do the job

of the whole snakepit

when you take out a contract

on anything as elusive as that.

I’ve made the bed

and you can lie in it alone

for as long as you want.

I’ll keep watch over you

like a mongoose or a lighthouse

over a bird that was stared to stone by snakes

and I won’t have anything to expiate

if I see their shadows

sliding hate mail under the door.

Fly little bird fly.

No more skies that lie like windows

about what you’re going through.

No more pretending

those bruises on your arm

are rare orchids of jungle love.

When you went to sleep

tangled up in the powerlines

you couldn’t teach to dance to your flute

and the rhythm of your body

like bullwhips

you might have felt

like a broken kite on a funeral pyre

but if my magic still works

by the time you wake up

I’ll make sure

you open your eyes like a phoenix.

So fly little bird fly.

The world won’t heal while you sleep.

Your lover won’t have a change of heart.

He broke you like a chandelier

he threw down the road

in a drunken rage

on a Friday night

like a bottle of beer.

One solitude denies another theirs.

Lovers take each other hostage.

The rest is the Stockholm syndrome.

One fanatic.

One addict.

It looks like devotion

It looks like a life raft on the sea of love

but the ocean’s gone rabid and mad.

Just look at the way it foams at the mouth.

Things are bad.

Fly little bird fly.

You’re not caught in the chimney

with no way out.

You’re the genie of the lamp.

You’re the one that tunes the power lines

that are humming along with you

like Mozart with a sparrow.

You’re the silence

that times the rhythm of the music.

You’re the tuning fork

not the lightning rod

of a wanna be god

in a pick-up truck

who keeps you around

to beat on like a false idol

who shalt not come before him.

Stop pecking at the crumbs of your dreams

like the leftovers of a garden

that used to be secret

That’s no way to get out of a labyrinth

when you’ve got wings.

So fly little bird fly.

Disappear into the depths of a starmap

that breaks into flames as you approach

the creative intensities of your own shining

like sumac in the fall.

Here’s the dead branch.

Here’s the green one.

You be the moon.

You be the blossom.

You be the firefly.

You be the hidden night bird

with the faraway call

that doesn’t make the distinction at all

because you’re too far gone to tell

by any feature of the light

you can often see things deeper

in a black mirror

than you can in a white.

PATRICK WHITE  

WHAT'S TO KEEP YOU FROM DANCING?

WHAT’S TO KEEP YOU FROM DANCING?

What’s to keep you from dancing if you’ve got nothing to live for?

Dance naked in your tears. Cry through your laughter.

Plunge into a black hole and come out the other side,

renewed, a virgin, no more feathers and tar pits.

No more dead petals in a dry fountain. Absurd, isn’t it?

When you begin to compare skulls with the moon,

not at all what you imagined you would see, not even

the prevailing consensus of delusion that passes for reality,

this neo-primordial soup of logos and memes

we’re all swimming in like fish in radioactive water.

This pre-Cambrian efoliation of multitudinous sentience

re-inventing cuneiform to write it all down in the Burgess Shale

three hundred million years from now, fossil by fossil

and one among myriads, the lucky lottery ticket

of a fish with a spinal cord that will lead eventually

back to the saddest excuses in the world for the likes of us.

I’ve stood on bridges late at night by myself

watching the waters flow as if my mindstream

were going on without me, and the pain were too much

even for a poet to sublimate his way out of,

and I’ve lived my way to the end of a labyrinth of cul de sacs

and wearied of their chronic recurrence like a water wheel

at an abandoned mill that used to gamble on a river boat

things would stay afloat long enough to make shore

before the ship goes down. The crucial point here

is not to live with regrets as if you had something personally

to do with all of it. There’s no starmap

for the burrs of the sorrows that smoulder

like brown constellations in the slums of an inflammable zodiac.

You diminish your arrogance at the expense of your humility

that’s grown as gigantic as God, when you think

you know enough about the unknowable to fix the blame

as if you’d just come up with a new alibi for you and the world.

Could be a curse. Could be a blessing. Could be

an improbable concourse of unforeseen events

that’s been chain-reacting well before

the infinite beginnings of the multiverse.

You cut your skin with razors as if you were

playing tic tac toe on your thighs, hoping someone

would come along like an antidote and suck the poison out.

But life isn’t sweet when you’ve learned

to weep through your fangs. Go ask the moon.

There’s no holy crusade going on as if the rose

aroused its petals to go to war against the infidelity of its thorns.

Even the predators, in their own way, are the children of their prey.

The longer the fangs. The sharper the talons. The harder the armour.

Ever seen what an owl can do to a snake? Yes,

things can be bad, but not necessarily for your sake.

They can be good, too, but if you think it’s for you,

you’re going to end up telling lies about suffering in your sleep

like a flashflood in a dry creekbed trying to wake the frogs

that have burrowed deep into the starmud for the duration

by singing to themselves in the rain as if they’d just had a revelation

it’s wet on the moon again. I’d could give you any one

of a thousand interpretations of your eyes. I could

turn your sacred snake’s tongue where the rivers part

into a green witching wand twitching over the watersheds

of mystic lightning. I could scry the self-sacrifice of your next breath

like the smoke of a distant fire on an autumn hillside

and try to explain the fireflies as the popular demotic

of the proto-nostratic of the stars and how that relates

to the scars on your leg. Befuddle you into a salvation

that would last at least a couple of decades before

you could ever find your way back by your own lights

to where you were going with the rain before I met you.

You’re not wrong. You’re not right. I could say that and mean it

as easily as a principled astrolabe looks upon a starless night

and doesn’t try to see what isn’t there. It isn’t dark.

It isn’t bright out. It’s clear all the way to the next star

if you don’t bind yourself to a mental atmosphere

where the mind suffers at the hands of its own weather

like a child that thinks it needs to be taught to wake up

from its own nightmare when, in fact, once things

begin to bottom out it’s as over as a bubble rising to the top.

Pop! No more delusion, no more enlightenment.

No more mirages taking charge of the wellsprings

in the desert of stars in ruins around Jericho

as the wind shapes the sands in an hourglass

like a potter or a sculptor into a sea of eyes

that can actually flow like tears of glass in the heat

you can drink from like a dragon on the moon

just before it begins to rain. And the grasslands awaken

of their own accord. And everywhere guitar-shaped gazelles

are getting up on their own four legs like amputees

that haven’t forgotten how to dance to the elegant thunder

of their own leopard skin drums. And the rain

comes back to your drought-stricken eyes again

and runs like rivulets and the unravelled threads of your lifelines

through the starmud gullies of your brain breaking

into waterlilies of insight on the banks of your mindstream

tempering the broken swords of moonlight

that are offered to it in tribute, not surrender,

because there is no war, into alloys of reality and dream,

delusion, enlightenment, imagination and awakening

no one before you has ever fallen upon like a dancer

who was cut to the quick by a life she’s not been out of step with

by not so much as one angstrom of a wavelength of a firefly

for all the billions of lightyears along the way

you’ve been leading a pilgrimage of shadows deeper into the night

like a calendar of shepherd moons

you’ve been slashing like a sundial on your legs

moments away from the shrine of broken promises

you intend to keep like a vow you made to yourself

sleepwalking your way across the corals of your grief in bare feet

as if sooner or later you could tread all that blood into wine.

Put your dancing shoes on. Crystal slippers. Moonboots. Winged heels.

Stop carving your body like a deathmask you can wear in the world

like an alphabet with omega as its only child.

Why lie down on the grave of that morose saint of clowns

you prayed to deliver you from yourself like the spade

you were using to dig your own ditch on the moon

for the mass assassination of the innocent and obscene?

I’m a poet. And to me you’re as beautiful inside and out

as a blank piece of paper after the first snow

has had a taste of moonlight and softly glows in the dark.

Not Joan of Arc singing at the stake of her own serpent-fire

feathering her body in flames, in boas of smoke to cover up

the glyphs of the bird tracks on the secret loveletter

she’s been writing to herself in the flesh to really mean

what she says when she says I want to live, I want to love,

I want to give and receive the way I breathe without

meaning anything by it. I want to see, because I have

brave eyes, deeply into the light, into the dark, the mystery

of a life that keeps on going without knowing where it ends.

PATRICK WHITE

WHEN THE SPIRIT MOVES

WHEN THE SPIRIT MOVES

When the spirit moves it’s the summation

of everything I am without definition,

the averaging out of all my existential crucials,

the dark matter of the moment

expressing the perennial insight

not as signs in the light, but light itself.

I don’t know what it is or it is not,

maybe just an enculturated meme of antiquated emotion,

or a way of hallowing the next breath I take.

I could be cynical and say it’s fake.

But then I’d have to eat my own ashes

with a long spoon, and what would I do

for an encore? Boring if the truth

doesn’t leave you gaping in wonder at something.

I’ve seen the wind at night in full moonlight

silvering the hot gold of the wheat

as if it were cooling a sensitive burn on human skin.

I’ve seen the fireflies in the valley

illuminate the cloud of unknowing

after a summer thunderstorm

like a chaos of lighthouses on shore

signalling to an empty lifeboat.

I’ve been engulfed by the fearful immensities

in the heart of a woman when her dark energies

start to accelerate space up to the speed of light

and even the most quotidian moments,

lipstick on a rumpled kleenex on the kitchen table

beside the abandoned mirror that couldn’t

get a handle on things, blood on the bedsheet,

the cooling red of a farewell rose, all,

supercharged with chameleonic frequencies

of eternity forever the silence of time and the void

when you’re mystically terrified by the passage

of beauty and passion into the carrying forth

of a waterclock just back from the wellsprings of it all.

Who knows where the time goes and everything with it?

I suspect it follows me home like a feral cat

that wants me to adopt it so it can bring me in

out of the cold. I used to think that spirit

was a smudge of a ghost, a gesture of air,

an aurora borealis in a twilight zone

where the sun shines at midnight and the snow blooms.

I used to try to touch the intangible with my imagination.

The void arrays the things of the world.

Can the mind do any less as a serious creator?

That’s when I discovered the fingertips of the very hand

I reached out with was the spirit reading Braille

because I was blind to what the dark constellations

in the black mirror were trying to tell me

engaging the spirit as a scribe and interpreter

one moment, then blowing it in my face, the next

like a squall of stars in a vertiginous gust of wind.

Snuffed out like a matchbook just when I thought

I had things flaring away like sunlight at a rave.

The spirit that witnesses is not a cartographer

with a surveying team on the dark side of an Orphic skull

to assess if all its softer continental plates

had synarthritically reassembled themselves

like Humpty Dumpty back into a cosmic egg.

The lamp might be shattered but that doesn’t mean

the light’s broken. The spirit never really mends.

It just keeps on shining in a wounded space

until it doesn’t feel the swords of the assassins of water

arming their shadows for a firefight with a dragon

that brings the rain like a medic to a battlefield

where the slain forgive their slayers for healing the moon.

The heart governs in silence. But the spirit moves

like a processional stillness through the mind

that shakes the diamonds out of the cuffs of your crazy wisdom

like dew from the mandalic cobwebs of the morning

and turns the lint in your empty pockets out

to show you you were richer than you thought

before you left home to seek your treasure elsewhere.

You cherish the jewels at the expense of your eyes.

One star tweaks your devotion more than the rest.

And they all go out at the same time. The spirit

doesn’t refuse the mind anything that allures it.

The full moon doesn’t obstruct the flight of the blue herons.

The spirit isn’t the voice coach or dream grammar

of what gets written about your life long after

you’re too far, too long, the moment you’re gone, to read it.

The spirit is like sentient space. It doesn’t come

with an entrance or an exit. The axis of the earth

might be the tent pole of a circus going up in a starfield,

and all the constellations swinging on a trapeze

in a travelling freak show of ring masters

and snake oil salesmen pitching their wares

on a blazing midway meant to befuddle the senses

into buying a peek at the grotesque and ugly

so you can secretly gloat at the shapeliness

of your own reality depending upon the comparison

for your sense of ascendency, your shaky rung

on the ladder out of the snakepit it’s got a foothold in

like a black hole cornerstone in an avalanche of galactic quicksand.

Spirit is flame, muse, familiar, sybil and friend.

No more than butterflies need to be liberated from their cocoons,

or dragonflies from their chrysales, the gerry-mandered huts

of their koans and fortune-cookies, does the spirit

need to be liberated from its earthly transformations. Who

can liberate the wave from water. Who can liberate

space from space? Just because the blossoms blow away

doesn’t mean they’re trying to flee the apple tree.

Let the spirit dance to its own picture-music.

Let the spirit play like the sea with its own weather.

In a bifurcated world that revels in reflecting its opposite

to get a rise out of consciousness, need one eye

be the disciple of the other? Speak quickly

or you’ll regret you forgot the answer

and start looking for intercessors to do it for you.

Dark watershed and radiant wellsprings of the muses

hauling up buckets of stars to bathe in like a moonrise,

your spirit a fountain, what need for it to drink spit

out of other people’s mouths, or masticate

the sacred syllables of someone else’s rapture at being alive

but its own? Whether you’re at a foodbank

or sipping nectar from the birdhouses of the gods,

even the angels can’t chew your spiritual food for you

and have it do you any good. Say, ah,

when you look at the world with infantile appetites

like gaping new moons trying to add to their collection

of silver spoons. Let the thief run off with them

like a crow with an eye for shiny things. The sooner

you get rid of the tinfoil, the sooner the shining

will get real for once and everything you rejoice in,

everything you feel and think and grieve for,

your commonsensical ignorance of the goat paths

up the mountain, and the avalanche of asteroids

you bring down on yourself as if your valley were a grave

the mountain dug for itself, to the enlightened lunatic

of your crazy wisdom raving in laughter with the wolves

at the rising moon, everything thereafter will taste of stars

in the eyes of the ageless friend you’ve made

of your own presence sweetening the air of a late October night.

PATRICK WHITE

THE FLOWERS OF THE STREET PEOPLE

THE FLOWERS OF THE STREET PEOPLE

White trash with their faces punched in like catcher’s mitts

mooning the flowers of the street people as they drive by

like a float in a pageant of ignorance having a good time

at everyone else’s expense. Pygmy heroes of their own irrelevance.

Annie, the bag-lady, puts the avalanche of her head down

and spits like salt as if she just survived Sodom and Gomorrah

as she passes by, sullen and resigned to the blackflies

that have swarmed her like the shadows of commas for years.

You just have to take one look at her face to know

she’s the dried rose of a gnostic gospel that went flakey

long before women were forbidden from invigilating

their own spirits. Given the protocols of the bleakness,

even the city can serve as a shrine of sorts. Man bulls

in lunar labyrinths, and the Princess of Spiders,

unweaving her thread in a moment of desire

waiting to have her webs elevated among the stars

in cosmic reprisal for the betrayal of her abandonment to love.

And there’s Peter, the architect turned shipwreck,

on a chain gang in a quarry, he’s cracked so many rocks

to extract the gold rush out of his sixty dollars worth of meteorites

and flush it through his veins like a motherlode

back into the ore of his panspermic flesh. He begs

money on the corner on behalf of his dealer

all day long, a begging bowl that still has to pay

for his drugs in paradise. One day, if he keeps complaining,

because the last thing to go when you’re mad,

is your understanding of money, the dealer’s

going to smile like a snake and pat him on the back

and say, yes, Peter, you’re right, you should be in on the take,

and give him a rock the size of Gibraltar

that will see his mummy being wheeled into

the sarcophagus of an ambulance by the morning

of the next replicated day. Which is maybe what he wants.

And who killed the hysterical rose lady who

for twenty years flogged a little beauty in the bars

to anyone who wanted to make a romantic move

on the flippant female sitting next to them

spending her disability cheque trying to forget

all the shabby dawns that have come on to her like boyfriends

and how she liked to throw them off the bridge to Hull

like the artworks of terrified ex-cons trying to make a getaway.

This actually happened to a friend of mine

in the squalid back room of a degenerate relationship

after he’d been raped repeatedly by a Christian reformatory.

But he can paint in any corner of six possible restaurants

in the Ottawa Market as if he had the eyes of a peacock

in the full bloom of a mating ritual with the waitresses.

And Kathy’s in the doorway again at the bottom of the fire escape

trying to flog the ruined waterlily of her youthful face

as if this were the red light district of Amsterdam

though it’s nothing as lavish as that, to the first john

who wants to use her body like a telephone booth.

I give her money for nothing when I have it and tell her

to spend it on whatever she wants,

so there’s no guilt in the gift to add to her sorrows

and she thinks I’m a funny, wise man,

and though I’m happy I can make her laugh about something

it only enhances my tragic sense of compassion

to feel how brutal the truth can be when I don’t say a word

to dissuade her from believing I’m wise, and she’s still pretty.

And those three skull fractures there

are trying to put a price tag on my Boulet cowboy boots

to denude an old man of his footware in a side alley

after the restaurants have closed down their kitchens,

but there’s still more leather in my heart than mushroom

and they might end up wishing they hadn’t dropped out

of anger management, after they taste the explosive rage

of my munitions factory in a supernova of fireflies

waking the dragons sleeping in an abandoned coal mine

trying to forge their eyes into diamonds, and their claws

into a titanium alloy of crescent moons folded like sabres

they can wield like a blacksmith hammers an anvil

as an objective correlative of all that’s wrong in the world.

Reductio ad absurdum. The philosophical savagery

of a furious muse biting at her wounds like razorwire

in an internment camp for racial profiles, Queen Bee

shows the prostitots and street pups how she uses her needles

to crochet her body like a tea cosy for a Saturnian moon

speedballing heroin and crack with a touch of acetone,

kerosene, and veinous hydrochloride for a purple sunset.

Seminars in vicecraft at the left-handed nightschool

where she teaches starmaps to a class full of armpits

who want to know where to hit up next. Too cool

to be groovy, too chill not to be an ice age,

the temperature plunges like a syringe in permafrost.

Most living through the human mess that’s left

of the mythically inflated lives they used to live

with ineffectual clarity about what’s given them up for dead.

Sleeping with schizophrenic terrorists at the Good Shepherd

who see murder as a form of assisted suicide

and waking up in the morning to a knife-fight

between a mattress and a man who’s been

sleeping with it all night like a woman

he gave everything up for to expiate the horror

of living his eternally recurrent worst nightmare out

like a leper colony of the inchoate body parts of Barbie Dolls.

Had a desperately unloved Barbadian chartered accountant friend once

who had his throat cut in the morning

by two recently released ex-cons in a rooming house

for cooking his fish too loud while they were sleeping.

And that on the heels of landing his first job interview

in the last five futile months, hoping he could

lure his wife and kids back to any standard of living

that didn’t distemper the contagion of his exile.

And the drunks are connoisseurs of shoe-polish

and cheap colognes, shaking like aspens on a street corner

hoping not to foul themselves again in a squad car

before they can regurgitate themselves in the drunk tank.

And all the runaways have run out of faces to flee to

except for the motherly ladybugs who take them

under their spotted wings, and pander them to friends

like cultivated perverts in distinguished places

that know all the G-spots of the ingenuous government

they’ve been molesting on the sly for years.

And it’s fruitless to condemn, judge, blame

or punitively litigate the collateral damage of life

because you’re too delicately squeamish to watch

how the cow is killed, bawling, that you’re about

to sit down and eat with your well-kempt family

and your weedless ethics, o so neat, like a close-cropped lawn.

And if it’s rough and crude. Armageddon isn’t a Sunday school.

And survival’s a boxer that gives and takes dirty shots.

And the only moral imperative life lives by is: Live.

And it’s been a while since I’ve seen anybody

walking in someone else’s moccasins to empathize

why the grace of God went with this one like a greased mirror

that that one had to hitch hike on a turn pike.

And one other thing. I’ve seen shipwrecks

wedged so long on the bottom into their starmud,

the moon among the corals has covered

their skeletons with flesh as if there were terracotta armies

for the most defenceless of us too, and unlike

the pigeons on the statues of the prime ministers

four blocks away, so stoically posed in their noble solitude

attached like figureheads to the foremast of a flag pole,

life thrives vividly all around them like a painter

with a Jamaican sense of colour. And there are luminosities

so brief and brilliant you’d think you were watching

fireflies drop acid with the stars, acts of surrealistic living

where people who have nothing but their mere presence left

cherish giving even that up as well as if compassion

among the desperate, were the last sign of self-respect

that such cornucopias of life can be engendered by shipwrecks.

PATRICK WHITE