ONLY THE LONELIEST OF GHOSTS GONE MAD

ONLY THE LONELIEST OF GHOSTS GONE MAD

Only the loneliest of ghosts gone mad

don’t fret their abstractions with facts.

The wind is pure and seedless and the moon

without weeds. Like old windows,

they weep tears of glass for what they’ve seen

like glaciers in an ice age slowly thawing out.

My voice is the tragic black box of many

panicked conversations trying to act professionally

just before things went deeply south. Orphic descents

into the underworld of the dead and the songs

I sang from the heartwood of my lyre, still resonate

like the shadows that flitted through the sacred groves,

the occult feathers of a coven of crows

that taught me posthumous dream grammars

have no verbs because everything’s already been achieved.

Strange, strange, and inexplicably human, how

the imagination is as easily seized upon

at this time of night by the dead and gone

as by the living, mysteriously animate and near.

I don’t deny there are demonic spirits

that can freeze my eyes with fear, lords

of the abyss that know how to clear a stage real fast

as all my dream figures sublimate like dry ice

into more habitable atmospheres, but I stay centred

at the nave of this prayerwheel of birth and death

and let whatever wants to emanate through me

fan out from there like the spokes of a sea star.

Together we make a zodiac of anathemas and benedictions.

The dead can bestow blessings and lift your spirits

like a curse if the timing’s right and you don’t

waste your trust on quoting chapter and verse.

Ghosts are the last inspiration of the air

the living breathe out as if they were returning

the waters of life to the river they drank from.

The moon passes on, but its reflection makes

an indelible impression upon the mind like a woman

grieving in a cemetery late at night for a baby

she held in her arms like the death of the dawn

and even the black dog of the autumn wind

is at a loss to know how to keen as deeply as that.

Voices out of nowhere, commanding no, don’t go in there

and others, gentle as fireflies that summon me

to follow bracken covered trails through the woods

to a plaque in the ground with a toppled Mason jar

of dried chicory and cornflowers that can still move me to tears

a hundred and fifty years after they died at twelve

of some garish pioneer fever with the name of their favourite colour.

I don’t shut the windows. I don’t close the doors.

I don’t smudge the air with sage or cedar boughs

to drive them out of the attic like bats. I let the dead

come and go as they please. I let their sorrows touch me

and my spirit bleed with empathy for the windfall

of wounded bells that haunt the grass like an eerie carillon

of death knells for the music of the past they once bloomed for

like new moons in a calendar of waning skulls. My house

is their house. They cling to me like an hospitable threshold

for homeless atmospheres very few among the living

know how to breathe in and out anymore without resorting

to a seance or an exorcism conducted like a bus stop for runaways

and vagrants common wisdom says it isn’t wise to trust.

Why shouldn’t the unsheltered dead take their place

at the round table in me like the shadow of a sundial

in a garden abandoned by time where dry-mouthed fountains of salt

still long for a taste of the rain in the tears of their dark watersheds

deep underground like wells that have yet to be divined?

The memory of the waters of life is the muse of the wine

they bring to the table like an echo of blood that’s gone on

ripening in them like uncultivated grapevines in the wild.

One drop on your tongue and you’re drunk

in the doorways of life for the rest of time like a dream

you can’t die in like an imperilled heart without

being grateful there’s as much to celebrate at the end

as there is a new start, that living and dying are the same event.

And as often as the dead have come to me in joy

though that might surprise the uninitiated who still divide

the hellbound from the heaven-sent, the fire from the light it sheds,

so the living have approached me like a perennial lament

for everything that’s missing in their lives like a bright vacancy

out of touch with the dark abundance that thrives

in their uprooted shadows like midnight at noon.

What sea do the Styx, Lethe, and Phlegathon flow into

that isn’t the same for the four mindstreams of awareness

that poured out of Eden, or the gardens and underground rivers

among the fountains of Salsabil in Jana or the waters of Babylon

Zion sat down and wept by? Or the dead leaves

of the burning maples I watch floating by on the Tay

like experienced fires inspired by the starmaps of autumn?

PATRICK WHITE

LOOKING AT THE RAIN. ARE YOU LOOKING AT THE RAIN

LOOKING AT THE RAIN. ARE YOU LOOKING AT THE RAIN

Looking at the rain. Are you looking at the rain,

alone in an upstairs window of a small town

deserted except for the salt trucks sowing the road,

watching it freeze in the tarpits and stretch marks

of asphalt smeared by storefront colours

that try too hard like circuses and brothels?

And the people dreaming behind the makeshift veils

they can see out of into the dark, but no one ever in,

should the lights be on, and they’re not. Are you

embracing yourself like a stranger in your solitude

by acclamation, no one to challenge who you must be?

And the sky glowing as if there were a fire

in the distance, you cannot see beyond

the looming rooftops, subliminally infernal,

marginally dispersed auras of infra-red

that fell off the flat earth of a pre-mixed palette?

I imagine you keeping your pain to yourself

like the secret name of a god you disclose to no one

for fear of them having power over you.

I imagine you trying to embody the whole mystery

of life within yourself like the improbable avatar

of all that’s invisible within you like a ladder of thresholds

the light has yet to cross. Not a god or goddess

but a mystically specific human being who doubts

the divinity of her own uniqueness. Once for everything

means no two alike, but the air is saturate

with comparative metaphors in the absence of stars.

I imagine you remembering sporadic lovers

you were hurt by, children who abandoned you,

parents who tried but could never really understand.

Doors you slammed in anger as if you were

turning your back on yourself like a red sportscar

that kept breaking down by the side of the road.

And how you decided to go the rest of the way

like an indeterminate leaf on your own mindstream

once you decided you weren’t a map to anywhere

that wasn’t as evanescent as you were at cartography.

Three hours from dawn and you’re still a seance of one.

You summon lonely trains like mourners

hired for a funeral. Who’s dying? Whose

deathmask are you paying homage to

by obeying the protocols of artificial respect?

I can intuit the sundial and the sanctuary

of the walled garden your heart keeps trying

to bloom in like a poppy in winter but you neglect it

like a small fire that’s pleading with you to tend it

instead of letting it bleed out like a hare in the snow.

I want to console you. I want to undo the daisy chain

of razor wire you’ve wrapped yourself up in

like a gift to someone you think deserves it

as a mockery of everything you once cherished

but if I were to slowly emerge out of the void

into the room like an enchanted island you could be

the Circe of, you’d change like a chameleon on the spot.

You wouldn’t be yourself in the confines of your loneliness.

You’d keep chanting the prophylactic mantra

of a Greek chorus in a satyr play as if

you’d just seen a hungry ghost rise up,

a deux ex machina through the creaking floorboards:

I am not. I am not. I am not. When, of course, you are.

So let me ease your fear by appearing

like a star you can’t identify by its shining alone

through a clearing in the clouds at your window.

Let me empower you like a firefly

of the first magnitude, a mandalic insight

that inspires you, because you’re weary and bored

of your colouring books, into making up

an original constellation of your own

that doesn’t show up on anybody else’s starmaps

but vastly improves your disaffection

with the the outlook of the ashes of the zodiac

you keep in the urn of a see-through telescope

like so many burning bridges you’ve crossed

like an albatross with an arrow in its heart

arcing across the sky, martyred by a curse

on the long, cold, barren beach of your windowsill.

Be Circe awhile and throw your pearls like a full moon

before swine that used to be men you couldn’t turn to

for nautical advice when they were shipwrecked

on the same shore you walk in isolation now.

Believe in the power of your own madness

to work wondrous transformations at either end

of your modes of seeing that are the lore

of blind poets, and the legends of your shining

more creatively intriguing than the war stories of Helen.

If all is lost, you don’t need to compete

with winning anymore. Paris throws the apple away

and says to the three goddesses, you choose

among yourselves. This is not a creation myth.

PATRICK WHITE

A GOOD DAY AND NIGHT ON EARTH FOR ME WOULD BE

A GOOD DAY AND NIGHT ON EARTH FOR ME WOULD BE

A good day and night on earth for me would be

hurling paint at an eight by four foot canvas

propped up on a rusty hay rake for an easel

on top of a hill by the soft basswood trees in late September.

A thin thread of blue smoke rising from the farmhouse

down below, somebody home and a satisfied ghost,

rising idly like a spirit from the heartwood of a log

of two year old maple I cut and split and stacked myself,

ten cubic cords of habitable planet to make it through the winter.

A good day and night on earth for me would be

like the early Muslims under Umar ibn al-Khattab’s caliphate,

knowing the angels were going to visit the town

around four in the morning, knowing everyone on earth

were given bread and flowers enough not to go to bed hungry tonight, 
that everyone had something they wanted to get up for in the morning
that made it easy and exhilarating to be alive, wild asters

saturated with sunlight and the humming of clumsy honey bees

just below the window apprenticed to a telescope.

Short focal length, Schmidt-Cassegrain reflector

on an equatorial mount with a clock drive synchronized

to the wheeling of the earth like a moonrise in Virgo.

A good day and night on earth for me wouldn’t be

knowing I was loved, but looking back over the tree rings

in my heart like the history of rain that left its mark on me

like every woman I’ve ever loved, sad, mad, bad, beatific

or indifferent to the fact she could make a locust tree bloom

as if it were enraptured by its own crucifixion, the crowns

and stigmata of the thorns it wore with prophetic distinction

like the first heretic ever burned by the new moon

who could taste the mystery of life in the ashes on his lips

when she kissed him one last time, and to steal a line

from Jim Morrison, turned his blood to mystic-heated wine.

Not to assess how well I was loved, but to feel extinct

knowing I gave everything I had to love and still fear

it wasn’t enough. It’s an indelibly memorable mode of madness

I may have fallen into like a habit that stuck like the La Brea Tarpit

somewhere along my antediluvian way, but I hold

the onceness of forever as lovers step away from each other

like an abyss on the downside of a dangerous precipice

up to my jugular vein a razorblade away from where Allah says

he is when I have no reason to disbelieve him. Love

is a sword dance with a waterclock in three four time so

a good day and night on earth for me would be

out walking with the stars alone through the high summer fields

quilted by wildflowers as the moon came up like a water-gilder

and breathed a skin of gold around every one of the tears

they’ve ever shed in joy when some cosmic egg cracked

like a koan in a dragon’s jaw and they were set free

like a winged horse beside Aquila and Cygnus to ride

their own eyebeams in the free range of the sky anywhere they liked,

when the wind throws off its chains like the rain

and I feel forgiven like a starmap for the times

they stubbed their hearts on my life like an asteroid belt

they couldn’t see in the dark on their way to the black market

of a species exchange on earth for something completely different.

A good day and night on earth for me would be

advancing backwards through all the stations of my childhood

and father myself like the man I always wanted to be

like some kind of playful wizard who knew he was

a great fool to squander his life on joy, but knew how

to stop the bleeding in a boy by uncuffing his life from a bike chain

or at least, when the lifeboat goes down, keep him

from feeling like salvage that should have stayed aboard to bail.

I want to mend that wound in every adolescent heart with gold

like the midnight sun smiling on good starwheat in the siloes

of a radiant end to a dark start. That what I sow outlives me well.

Like morning glory in the lobby of the Hollyhock Hotel.

If it were a good day and night on earth for me, it would

have to be for everyone else as well. I’d have to see

the homeless wearing new thresholds on their feet

that welcomed them at the door like prodigal sons and daughters

that didn’t want a black sheep slaughtered in their honour,

and every young girl weeping in the corner of a restaurant

right now so her friends don’t see her nursing a broken heart

like a voodoo doll gored on the horns of a heavy curse

might rise from her gloom like the moon-rise

of a Minoan bull leaper vaulting through the crescents

of her dilemma and landing on her own two feet on the other side.

PATRICK WHITE

THE WORDS ARE AS BIG AS THEY'VE ALWAYS BEEN

THE WORDS ARE AS BIG AS THEY’VE ALWAYS BEEN

The words are as big as they’ve always been

but the mouths of the people that use them

have grown small, their voices the size of wrens

when they once could shriek like eagles in defense

of the precipitous eyries of their aquiline principles

as if they hadn’t spent their lives with their wings folded

in an aviary with a bird’s eye view of what

the earthworms are looking at. Songs in the dawn,

aubades, but from a cage with an executioner’s hood over it.

People can’t get the word love down their throats anymore

without masticating it to death like flavourless gum,

and the dragons have forgotten how to unlock their jaws

to swallow the moon whole to bring on the rain.

Pain narrows the eyes of oviparous children

like thorns that have upstaged the wounded rose that lies

on the sidewalk in a pool of blood that bloomed like bullet-holes.

Stigmata of concrete. The virgin’s eyes are a morphine drip.

Remember the old Zen mondo about a man

chased over a cliff by a hungry tiger, clutching a bush

slowly pulling out of the side of the cliff wall

like the piton of a mountain climber, while another

open-mawed carnivore waits down below for him to fall

and what does he do, in his moment of peril, but reach out

for a ripe strawberry growing beside him as if

to retrieve something good that might distract him

from the issue at hand. Umm, good, like a cigarette

in front of a firing squad, rabid meringue on the mouths

of the distempered hydrophobes who believe

they’re drowning like waterboarded lifeboats

that drink spit from other men’s mouths like Cool Whip.

Madness in diaspora focused like a gunsight

trying to shoot out the stars like a sniper firefly

with an arsonist’s tendency to return to the scene of the crime.

Ice burns like crystal fire in the heart of a sophisticated savage

electronically wired to its own ideological rage.

I have an expansive heart accelerated by dark energy.

Friends and lovers, children, and family, gods, art, the stars,

things have grown further apart over the lightyears.

Meaning showed up like a gateway drug in my life

and I’ve been interrogating my sorrows ever since,

why we must die, what we were born for, how to live

so you don’t puke at what you’re reviewing on your death bed

just before you drown in the omnipresent abyss

that lets you down like a lifeboat into your own grave.

Words had a facility for me. I was the best liar on the block.

Myths poured out my mouth. I liked to arouse the wonder

in people, watch their hearts gape at the mystery of being alive.

Maybe I was only trying to convince myself, but the power

of the magic I felt was irresistible, and there seemed something sacred

in the sharing, the mutual enhancement of awareness

I could be the catalyst of, and who knows, maybe that was good,

maybe that was love, and though the child in me felt like roadkill,

maybe I could still steal fire like Prometheus with my liver torn out,

maybe there was still some use in the world for a corpse

that could speak like a prophetic skull for what’s about to befall

all of us, by directing their minute attention like the big picture

to the mysterious beauty and ardent truth of here and now.

And if love wasn’t a gift with my name on it, I could

achieve it somehow by making a gift of a gift, by living

open-handed in the midst of so many fists. Not as a martyr,

a messiah, a guru, a walking encyclopedia, a shaman,

an emblematic poor boy who pulled himself up like the universe

by his own bootstraps, I hated all of that as pretence,

fraud, screening myths for an ego coiled like a rattlesnake

under a rose-bush. My head in the stars, my feet in the gutter,

nothing was occult to me by the time I was seven, and yes,

you might feel like a witchdoctor for a moment

like one of the gram masters of the dynastic streets,

but more often than not, your eyes were pierced by dirty needles

like a voodoo doll, or thrown on the pyres of your love affair

with yourself, like a strawdog after a religious ritual.

I was prematurely wise and grey as the concrete I’d been raised on

like bedtime nightmares about some things. I’d seen

what people can do when they’d been taught by disappointment

to hate themselves like a cult of futility dedicated

to evangelizing the viciousness of Sisyphus standing

under an avalanche of stones that rolled back down upon him

like a calendar of moonrises that didn’t have the mountain gears

to make the grade. Spiders of stone enthroned in the dream catchers

of shattered windshields and rear-view mirrors.

Words not a cure-all, no, but still mightier than the sword

to judge by the ones that have been thrust through my heart.

Poetry, the most compassionate of the arts except

to its practitioners. A noble calling with a muse

as old as prostitution. Words the sacred whores

outside the Iseum, not thirty years of Vestal virgins

keeping the home fires of Rome burning. I don’t care

what you had for breakfast. I read your book.

It’s a begging bowl of soggy cornflakes. Where

are the waterlilies? What depths did you write this out of,

or did they evaporate on you like shallow tears

and lunar atmospheres before you had a chance

to shed them? You’re a snake-charmer in leotards, ok,

but where are the snakes? Where are the heretics

immolated in the oracular fires of underground volcanoes

filling their lungs like bongs with visionary fumes?

Burn, baby, burn. Even the library of Alexandria

sang in its own flames enraptured like a star

in its own shining instead of merely talking about the light.

Show me a firefly of insight. Show me a black hole

that dug its own grave expecting everybody to lie down in it

with it like Jonestown, or your buddy there with his

three thousand saddle-stitched individually signed books

he’s flogging like the annals of history, volume L,

at a strategically placed table in a shopping mall,

ask him if he knows how to get drunk on death

as readily as he does on his carbonated stuff like

the sixth pressing of life in the vineyards of the Burgess Shale.

Come on, sunshine, put some night into it. Linger

in the doorway of a death in life experience for

the rest of your life, never, ever knowing for certain

whether it’s a grand entrance or a pathetic exit

or someone’s just poking their head through the curtains

to see if there’s anybody out there listening in the dark.

And if there is, remember this like Simonides of Ceos

or Metrodorus of Scepsis, you just have to show up

like a lifeboat, you don’t need to come on like an ark

in anticipation of the flood that will come after you like the Arctic.  

WHEN GRIEF GROWS SAVAGE AND THERE'S NOTHING TO HUNT

WHEN GRIEF GROWS SAVAGE AND THERE’S NOTHING TO HUNT

When grief grows savage and there’s nothing to hunt

and all your mandalas are turning back into cave paintings

running down a limestone wall like spears

in the tears of weeping shamans, and you want

to tear your heart out and eat it to nourish your emptiness

but you’re not sure if it’s still the noble enemy it used to be,

or if the power of its sympathetic magic has past

the expiry date, and you think you might be

the last of the big mammals to go extinct in the ice-age,

time to sit down on the ground and have a good laugh

at how the things we take most seriously in life

make sacred clowns of us all in the last analysis

just before enlightenment. Put your lifemask on again,

coax a star or a firefly out of the tinder of that nebula

you’re blowing on until you’ve got a good blaze going

then throw all your grave goods on it as if

you were sending them on ahead of you

while you danced the pain away like the sky burial

of the ghost of another age that’s been haunting you

like a glacier that’s slowly beginning to wash itself clean of itself

as the numbness in your heart thaws like a baby mammoth

that fell into a crevasse of ice, and your fingertips

are melting like elk horn candelabra at a native exorcism.

And, yes, it stings for a while just as things are starting

to warm up, but that too will pass like a wet snowfall in April,

when your blood will begin to flow again

as if it were teaching the wild columbine and gypsy poppies

to waltz to the picture-music of the wind without banshees

howling and scratching at your eyes like dead branches

as if they were raking their fingernails against the glass

of a cold, crystal skull disappearing like an ice-cube in a night cap.

Sit down on the ground and have a good laugh

on the tab of everything that’s ever wounded you

and you just watch how easy it is to wipe

that gruesome grin off the face of the moon

like the sabre-toothed Smilodon that mauled you

and replace it with the smile of a Chesire cat

that just ate the canary in a coal mine of fossilized constellations

because grief can intensify the darkness into diamonds

that can see through the translucency of the tears in your eyes

new stars breaking out all over like waterlilies in the night skies

waiting for you to name them and give them myths of origin

derived like starmaps from the legends of your own shining.

Eventually the jesters of crazy wisdom will come to us all

and wipe the tears from our eyes and paint stars in their stead

we can point out to the cloaked ones

under the covers of their death beds

as if the deeper and darker the night the better to see

trillions of fireflies flung off the wheeling

of the celestial spheres like compassionate insights

into what we suffer for, what we lose whenever

we try to possess forever by trying to pour

the universe out of the universe like a waterclock in Aquarius

when we’re already swimming through eternity

like Pisces and there’s never a moment that passes in life

that isn’t a vernal equinox in a locket we hold close to our hearts

that doesn’t bloom in the fires of enlightenment

like star seeds hidden under the eyelids

of last year’s dolorous windfall of pine cones

because however the wind screams

through the broken wishbones and harps

of our shattered limbs, our torn dreams,

the eighth time we get up from our seventh time down

we get up and stand our ground like evergreens in the starfields.

PATRICK WHITE

THE LIGHT DOESN'T TALK TO THE FLOWERS ANYMORE

THE LIGHT DOESN’T TALK TO THE FLOWERS ANYMORE

The light doesn’t talk to the flowers anymore

the way it used to. I can feel a lot of shadows touching my face

as if it were written in braille. Acid in the rain.

Tears of dry ice in the housewell. Weathervanes

knocking at the door to get out of the storms

they used to revel in, and the storms themselves,

no kamikazes riding a divine wind against the Mongols,

at best, a mango-flavoured tempest in a Japanese teapot.

And even Zen can’t put an edge on the full moon

to cut through everything like a harvest being threshed.

No songs from the birds that used to wake me up in the morning,

only these spiders weaving their smokey laryngeal webs

like a voice that got stuck in the throat of a chimney

when it forgot, when you sing from the heart,

you don’t need a medium or a seance. Not even an art

that’s interested in what you’re saying unless

you’re obeying a grammar of headstones that don’t know

what you’re talking about until it’s not worth

bringing up anymore in anybody’s language

whether the metaphors are living or not. Words in a bonebox.

Locks and bars on our eyes. Dumb-bells stuck through our tongues

like someone was doing voodoo on the leaves

or the baton of a drum major in a parade

that’s never going to come, afraid to leave home on its own.

Since I was a boy in the late Cretaceous,

I’ve always wondered about the timing

of the asteroids and comets and why

they had such an impact upon the dinosaurs.

But I hear they were already on their way to extinction

because of the earth’s own volcanic activity,

and, at worst, the asteroid just accelerated

the flywheel of birth and death a bit.

Bad spin on an antiquated myth of origin.

Better luck next time, but right now the mammals

have evolved so far beyond that they’re destroying themselves

in a long, slow nuclear winter of attrition

that’s putting a pillow over everybody’s face

like the cloud cover of a screening myth with an air force

that buffers the light with our own ashes

and much prefers smouldering to ignition.

What did Berryman say in a letter to Wang Wei,

centuries after the fact, just before he jumped from a bridge

into an ice-covered river with the Pulitzer Prize in his hands?---

O to talk to you in a freedom from ten thousand things.

Be dust myself pretty soon. Not now. Or words to that effect.

But just the same, it’s hard to get into the skull

of the man anymore without the flame of a candle or a dragon

to see where you’re going in case you nudge an atom the wrong way

and bring on another astronomical catastrophe inadvertently.

Minefield covered in snow like a pioneer cemetery

buried on the hilltop of an avalanche with a view of the valley below.

Dangerous, too, to move among the stars freely

like a rogue planet without a starmap, causing perturbations

in the orbits of the shepherd moons on an exploratory flyby

to see if there’s any kind of intelligent life you can identify with.

The nights are getting darker. The stars are moving further apart.

Sooner or later everything tends toward empty space

until there isn’t even any room left in it for itself.

And nothing ever dawns upon you there but endless entropy

and time comes to a sudden halt where spaces runs out

and the bones of the fossilized stars are left like empty chairs

in a dark auditorium with bad acoustics.

I’ll write it on the wind now, while I have the chance.

I’ll write it like a fire in smoke at a ghost dance.

I’ll write it in blood and tears and rivers and stars.

I’ll write it in scars and wounds as deep as roses.

I’ll write it on the skins of the snakes that I’ve shed

like serpent fire running up the lunar thread of my spinal cord

like a lightning rod tattooing the clouds of unknowing

with the insights of fireflies into the mysterious darkness of life,

who know that one glimpse is enough of a Big Bang

to satisfy even the blind who go looking for their eyes

with their eyes like a windfall in a thunderstorm of picture-music

though they’re still hanging on to the same old lifeline

like an umbilical cord between the backdoor and the barn

in blizzard of stars and butterflies. I’ll write it in light.

I’ll write it on the eyelids of eclipses and occultations alike.

I’ll write it on the foreheads of the mute rocks

in runic striations of glaciers retreating north in tears,

I’ll write it on my bones before I’m buried under the hearthstones

with a big rock on my chest like an asteroid

rolled over a cave to make sure I’ll never rise again

like Jesus and Muhammad said I would if I was good,

or Ali Baba and the forty thieves muttering their shibboleths

on the thresholds of an artificial paradise, in case I wasn’t.

Now is the light. Now is the loving and the living.

Now is the hour for the hidden nightbirds to raise their voices

in the sacred groves of the moon to celebrate

the brevity of their own longing for the unattainable

blossoming on the dead branch of their aspiration.

There’s only so much time, and then, in a moment or two, forever.

The heart sings awhile like a red-winged black bird on a green bough.

And then the eyeless silence of the stars

who have looked down upon nothing for 14.3 billion lightyears

and watched the fireflies dancing to the music

of their own tiny hearts, lockets of light, of insight,

that open like seeds and eyes sown into the abyss

to let all winged things, and even star-nosed moles can fly,

out of the cages of their earthbound solitude like dragons

taken down like occult books from their hardwood shelves,

with the wingspan of constellations singing in the night to themselves.

PATRICK WHITE

FIREFLIES LIKE TERRORIST ACTS AGAINST THE STARS

FIREFLIES LIKE TERRORIST ACTS AGAINST THE STARS

Fireflies like terrorist acts against the stars.

Truth on the oyster of the tongue spun

like a grain of sand, an irritant fact

into the nacreous lustre of lies. Those are pearls

that were his eyes, the politicians sink so low

they’re flatworms in platform shoes.

Not a good idea to wipe your ass

with your own ideals in public. It

shocks the mob to realize their magi are maggots.

When the mob loses face, heads roll.

The latent rage of a thousand real and imagined ills

swarm out of the pinatas of your May Day festivals

like the nemetic scourge of God whipping the eyes

of the media into a frenzy of visionary vengeance.

Paranoia becomes a civic duty and Big Brother

no more than someone you know in the Mafia

doesn’t give a damn whether you’re related to him or not.

Maternal piety suckles at the poppy’s breast

and we bleed like the dreams of sleepwalkers

on the prophylactic precipice of the razor’s edge.

Down below in the middens of the rejected

the skulls of children heaped like shepherd moons

that didn’t make the cut of random luck

and ideological purity run amok with inhumanity

like secret police with unlimited budgets

to protect the state by interrogating the genomes

of their citizenry for any mutant signs of evolution.

The most bitter and appalled among us profess optimism

like roses in the sunset of a mushroom cloud

as lethal as the Angel of Death when it rains

and amateur survivalists are complaining of stomach pains.

Science is taught to shut its mouth by a thug

that knows what’s good for it is also good

for the Golden Goose that lays the cosmic eggs

in the Eleusinian Mysteries of dialectical materialism.

Covert telescopes replace the glass eyes

of enlightened Cyclops with black ops that move

like Ninjas in the night, the hashashim of the Old Man

of the Mountain, the shining city on a hill,

to eliminate any doubt of the positive outcome

of imperial altruism bearing the white man’s burden

like Coca Cola, ho, ho, ho, come like Santa Claus to Belize,

or Shell to the arctic like the ark of an oil platform

leaking like the shepherds of the black camel

in the white deserts in the land of the midnight sun.

Five billion years of astronomical catastrophes creatively

eliminating species that weren’t related directly to us

and the acclamation of human consciousness as the only

mode of intelligence to make it in the long run

like the Boston marathon through a gauntlet

of pressure cookers that can’t stand up on their own two legs

without cooking nails in the practical crackhouses of hardware stores

prosthetically intent on martyring human femurs

on a pyre of crutches you can’t throw away like a miracle cure

at the top of the cathedral stairs you climbed on your bleeding knees

to walk on air like a prayer to the angels of mercy

listening like drones and satellites high overhead

to the screams of the uncircumspect innocent at the finish line.

Desecration, as if we were angry with our gods

like the Mayans who burnt their temples one day

in desperation for a famine the seven fat kine

the untempered greed of the bankers caused

at the end of civilization that knows more about us

than we do it, with honey for some and locusts for others

in a foreclosed wilderness with radio-controlled wolves,

and nano-sized mosquitoes like puncture wounds

at the beginning of the data chain that leads

like breadcrumbs on the road of knowledge suspiciously

like the photo-shopped streets of London back to us

like a hallucinogenic reality show in highspeed HD.

Decry something sacred, something unanalytically

vulnerable like a misplaced faith in the immunity

of our genetically modified mothers to protect us

from diseases like an insurance policy that didn’t cover us

or the honey bees o.d.ing on the pestilential nicotinoids

that cling like smallpox to the blankets we gave the natives

to keep warm like a guest with a fever in the charnel house of life.

What sweetness mined like pollen from a corpse flower

is ever going to taste like viscous sunshine to a corporate hive

whose growing pains are always parasitical genocide

of one kind or another? Caterpillars against butterflies.

Pervs, perps, terrorists, ghouls and demented one percenters

of the unbikerly kind, the mob won’t die benignly like road kill.

Once the genuflective holiness of the gilded shepherd’s crook

is seen by the sheep who bleated for rescue to be what it is,

a cattle prod in an abattoir of grain-fed coup d’etats,

you’ll be eating the meat of your children boiled

in their mother’s milk, when the mob’s preference

for fair-mindedness is murderously offended like a snakepit

that was minding its own business like Babylon at a ball game

when your bomb went off like a prelude of the apocalypse

you so furtively desire like a plague rat of self-hatred

seeking notoriety in the shadows of things to come

that go boom, boom, boom, like something infernally gargantuan

protecting her young like the infuriated mother of mayhem.

PATRICK WHITE