TRYING TO SHINE TO BLIND THE VOODOO DOLLS

TRYING TO SHINE TO BLIND THE VOODOO DOLLS

Trying to shine to blind the voodoo dolls

sticking sharp pins of insight dipped in stinging nettles

into my eyes like burning thorns that won’t wash out

even when the blue rose of the sky

puts her face in her hands and cries her heart out.

Made my Icarian ascent to the sun

like a kamikaze pilot in reverse trying to be positive

about the self-destructive aspirations

under my thawing wings, now

I’m trying to keep my balance on my spinal cord

stretched like a highwire suspension bridge

across an abyss that keeps expanding my insignificance

as I juggle planets with my feet I keep dropping

like my head in a guillotine made for mercy.

I want to say this is the dung-heap, this is the dogshit,

these are the maggots that thrive in the corruption of it

like toxicara worms that get in your eyes

and under your fingernails, and burrow

like small black holes through your heart

and let all the light out of your life like a slow leak

somewhere in the pipeline of the universe

that’s fracking me inflammably like a watershed

and I’m trying so hard to snow all over it

with the highest ideals of understanding and compassion,

every mystically specific flake sidereally designed

to ameliorate the repulsive and obscene

by cloaking it in white like an albino hypocrite.

For light years I used to believe if you

threw flower seeds in it, you could work it

like starmud blooded by a battlefield of torn corpses

into a bumper crop of zinnias and sublimely poignant stargrass.

Marvellous transformations of an outhouse

into the lunar beauty of the nocturnal Taj Mahal

making the black mirror, like the lost sheep, more beautiful

in a universe where love and light and life so often seem

mere mutations of the darkness.

Didn’t really want to make an ideology of a wild guess,

that would only add to the mess of cultish concepts,

and not really born to sow stardust

into the ploughed wound of a worm,

nevertheless, I drew a gold sword

out of a philosopher’s stone

and plunged it through the base metal of my heart

to suffer all those little deaths in life

and those liberating space twisting

indelible excruciations of cosmic transformation

that wrought this discipline of disobedience

I practise like an art into the absurd freedom

of the crazy wisdom that’s needed to make

a start somewhere, somehow, however small

by adding my crystal skull to the shining

like the sacred syllable of a drop of water

off the tongue of a silver leaf in the moonlight

that listens to it fall like a cross

between a good word and a tear on deaf ears below.

So I throw flower seeds on it in passing, the way

I throw all my loose change into a guitar case

trying to sing for a living against the impossible odds

of a dungheap laid like the corrupt cornerstone of things,

the ship of state expurgating in public like a sick whale

spinning the Parisian potential for the screening myths

of expensive, narcotic fragrances of rot on the Perfume Trail.

Say it isn’t so, Joe, but there you go, it is.

The terrorist oilwells are planting i.e.d.s

of inflammable water in the faucets of everyone’s kitchen,

so we can all burn to death

drowning in our showers in the morning

trying to chill things out

with corporate hellfire and brimstone

and legions of demon lawyers that give lying a bad name.

Been trying not to get so down I get

knocked off my axis like Neptune

ducking down below the celestial equator

and be dragged down into my own depths

by the snapping turtle of the world

that’s founded upon it like a totem on a gantry.

Barring the occasional eclipse to keep

the calendars tuned to the prophecies of doom

ranged against the small beginnings of the new moon

that might squeak through the third eye of the needle

just like mammals did at the end of the late Triassic

as the insignificant consequence of a cosmic event

that upgraded scales to feathers and fur to skin

as wolves turned into whales. Creative destruction

evident in extinction and evolution the same.

I try to keep my spirits up like a lead kite

by approaching it all as if it were

delightfully and horrifically absurd spontaneously

but an unmeaningly free and creative medium nevertheless,

and even if it isn’t etc., the most intriguing of delusions

it’s taken me light years to adapt to

without sitting in perpetual judgement

on the immensity of the darkness

that intensifies the nebularity of my enlightenment

with starclusters of insights that flower

like a mirage of fireworks in my dazzled mind.

Even if it’s no more than a flash of light out of the void

richocheting off the facet of a grain of sand,

or a firefly trying to stand up to the lightning,

or slim volume of igneous poems

wedged like a matchbook between tomes

like anthers of fire with phosphorus pollen

that will spread like wildflowers when it finally blooms

like foxfire in the ashes of an old growth forest.

Even to stand like a lighthouse on the moon,

having lost its sense of purpose, and yet,

still keep the fire in the tower burning as if

there might be a storm the way things change

and there could be a shipwreck, some nights

are so strange they’re like waves or cats

that leave things like dead moles and snakes

on the threshold of the far shore of your door out of here,

I’ve tried to keep on shining like a candle

trying to stay awake at a black starless mass

trying to make things dark enough to make an appearance,

and even when I haven’t managed it,

and all my shepherd moons are scattered like black sheep

by the snarling wolf of my mystically liberating nature,

suddenly showing up like the skull and crossbones

among the angel fleets grazing on the waves,

I’ve elevated waterlilies of constellations

that sat below the salt in the lowest place of all

to the zenith of my dreams like starmaps in transit

I’ve kept alight in a nightwatchman’s eyes for years

as he makes the rounds of the zodiac

like a candle still burning in the lanterns of his tears.

PATRICK WHITE

CANTERBURY BELLS, A CARILLON OF THE SORROWS WITHIN ME

CANTERBURY BELLS, A CARILLON OF THE SORROWS WITHIN ME

Canterbury bells, a carillon of the sorrows within me.

Something beautiful growing out of a garden-plot of pain.

The dark so deeply wounded, it brings forth stars.

And the river runs by the willow as time speeds up

to a standstill, nothing in sight as far as the eye can see

as it evaporates like a crystal ball with all its visions,

a wraith in the mist, a breath on a winter night

when you’re looking for your shadow cast by Venus

just to say you’ve seen it and somehow that’s significant.

No will of its own the abyss is inexorable,

and you feel so ageless and alone you can’t help

but know this is the image of divinity you were created in

like a hidden secret that wanted to be known,

a black hole peopling its inconceivability

with familiar dream figures it can relate to

its own estrangement through by looking

through your eyes like a snakepit of oracular telescopes

trying to read their own bones. Canterbury bells,

violet as a touch of sad genius, flowering.

Hard to know who’s making who up when

you’re collaborating on a dream together

with everything else that substantiates your existence.

As you, theirs. It might well be an empty lifeboat

full of moonlight drifting without a star on the horizon

anywhere, and though you can reasonably unexplain it,

your understanding, grown inclusive as the nightsky

inevitably glows like a pilot light of compassion

for every sentient thing, and don’t think the rocks

are any less animate than the starmud you’re made of,

lost on this great nightsea in a squall of awareness

that sometimes sees you scuttled on the moon

in the Sea of Tranquillity, and others, shipwrecked in the Pleiades.

Canterbury bells on nightwatch, greyed by

the tungsten lamp post as somebody sleeps

they’re looking out for like a tower of delicate mouths

with no secrets left to disclose, except for

the green clappers of their pendulous capstones

still in bud. And I could go on like the widening wake

of a simulacrum trying to circumscribe

a sense of identity encompassing all the god-particles

and the wavelengths they inspire in the imagination’s

passage through time until the waterclocks of our mindstream

don’t know what hour it is for any of us anymore except it’s dark.

But my presence has caught the attention of a star

taking a bird bath in the foliage of a well-plumed elm

standing like an imposing fountain in the ocean of itself,

its roots as deep as its crown is high as I sense

an intelligent resonance, indigenously wise and aristocratic,

an earthly excellence it’s kept alive in its heartwood

after all these lightyears of quotidian profusion

like a secret aspiration to reach out for the moon like a river

beginning to shed its leaves like waves, a long road

worth the walk, a ghost dance of smoke around

the homeless evanescence of an underground root fire,

that speaks as one for many tongues, breath by breath,

aspire beyond yourself like a shadow of the inconceivable

when you’re wandering alone at night through the heritage life

of a small town, intrigued, in passing, by how unbelievable

extraordinary, ordinary things are when you show them your solitude

like the scar of a bond with the moon that remains unbroken.

PATRICK WHITE

WRITERS STRIVING SO HARD TO BE UNLIKE ONE ANOTHER

WRITERS STRIVING SO HARD TO BE UNLIKE ONE ANOTHER

Writers striving so hard to be unlike one another

as they’re looking for new similitudes between themselves

and the many in the one, the one in the many,

everyman writing the autobiography of his loss of identity.

Everywoman etching hers with her fingernails

like grafitti on a glass ceiling breaking

like chandeliers of rain along the fault lines

of a shift in continental plates. Captain of a dreamliner

I set myself adrift like a lifeboat a long time ago.

I sing to my own silence whenever I want to be heard.

Savagely vatic, a wry surrealist with mystic outcomes

I rely on too much, I can see the horror and the humour

in the sublimity of the black, morality farce

that gets laid over your face like a death mask

people can recognize you by like a patina of soot

on the thin chapbooks of the butterflies sipping

from a Venus fly trap like the wellspring of the muse.

Young, in a room that doubled for a shrine,

I had a dark genius for making people mad.

Later, as islands emerged out of my magmatic rage,

my fist relaxed and I acquired a grace for making them cry

but that was still the lunar achievement of a journeyman

watergilding children walking skinless through the world,

wrapping their tears in the iridescent sheen of the nightsky

like a lullaby that had compassion for their dreams.

Master of nothing now, working in the creative freedom

of an abyss that entices me out of myself

like nature into the vacuum of an unknown medium

when I’m not a genie on call, I can hear the laughter

of the sacred clowns in the iconic guildhalls

of a little skill, more yielding than a thousand acres,

you can carry around with you for life like the voice

of a nightbird that knows how to penetrate the dark

like the embodiment of a longing that asks for nothing back.

Ripples on the waters of life. Echoes in solitude.

If I shine, I shine without deliberation. If I love

I rise like foxfire from the ashes of the inspiration.

Ragged in the cloak of a noble calling, sometimes

I’m wrapped in darkness like the skeletal kite

of a troubled bat that can hear more than it can say.

The night is not a reward, but there’s never

a credible alibi for not laughing at yourself

for the crazy wisdom of an allegorical starmap

trying to get you to sit still like a fixed star

for your astral portrait in eighteenth dynasty starmud

glazed in Babylonic lapis lazuli and copper from the moon.

The gesture of a Mosaic snake among the pharoah’s magicians,

I wear the jester’s cap of a daylily when the stars

look into my eyes too seriously to see what keeps me burning

after so many light years away from the island universe

on which I was born. Life, the mystery of perishing perennially,

there’s a hidden secret to being clear that supersedes the obvious.

And when death calls for it, I gouge my eyes out

like symbolic jewels embedded in the underworld

so I can envision the eschatology of meanings

trying to justify their ends as if death had embarrassed them

by not making any sense they could cling to for solace in life.

I celebrate the absurdity of the insight death brings forth

like a firefly with the candlepower of billions of stars.

How the mighty must fall to appreciate the magnificence

of their own insignificance raised up like a grain of sand

to keep the pyramids in perspective like studs on Orion’s belt.

I enjoy a hermetic social life among a variety

of prophetic skulls, but even the moon isn’t a palliative

for my solitude when I hallucinate the fate that awaits me

like a lover at every corner of my coffin. Pay the mourners

before the tears on their cheeks are dry. Didn’t I write

the most amazing odes to catch their beauty on the fly?

Didn’t I publish the names of the flowers and the stars

that moved my spirit to give them something

to remember me by like the lyrical elation

of an unpredictable moonrise? Didn’t I emblazon

the heraldry of new constellations with argent starmaps

on the shield walls of exoskeletons in the Burgess Shale?

Wasn’t my madness enough to convince the shore-huggers

of the imminent dangers of an oceanic awareness

beyond the eyes of their circumspect tidal pools?

Came a time when I realized it crucially necessary

to be given up for lost like a heretic with nothing to confess

but forgiveness for the spiritual search parties

in the labyrinths of everybody’s fingertips in order

to decipher a way out of here like Braille hieroglyphs

breaking trail like a cul de sac in a desert of stars.

Don’t the homeless still seek shelter within

the boundary stones of the firepits I left in my wake

like lost and founds along the way I had to take?

Don’t gauge the size of the city by the measure of its gates.

Exits don’t always live up to the expectations of the entrance.

Sometimes the sunset disappoints the dawn.

And then here and gone all things turn around in a heartbeat

like the wind and the sea, and the toxicity of tomatoes,

and all those weathervanes we used to flip through

like telephone books with tenure, set in their ways

like wet cement, appear cumbersomely contrived and shallow

beside the depths of the nightbirds singing

in the shadows of the moonrise they’re drowning

their voices in like stars in the throats of autumn trees

with their hearts in their mouths like the taste of wild blackberries.

PATRICK WHITE

WRITERS STRIVING SO HARD TO BE UNLIKE ONE ANOTHER

WRITERS STRIVING SO HARD TO BE UNLIKE ONE ANOTHER

Writers striving so hard to be unlike one another

as they’re looking for new similitudes between themselves

and the many in the one, the one in the many,

everyman writing the autobiography of his loss of identity.

Everywoman etching hers with her fingernails

like grafitti on a glass ceiling breaking

like chandeliers of rain along the fault lines

of a shift in continental plates. Captain of a dreamliner

I set myself adrift like a lifeboat a long time ago.

I sing to my own silence whenever I want to be heard.

Savagely vatic, a wry surrealist with mystic outcomes

I rely on too much, I can see the horror and the humour

in the sublimity of the black, morality farce

that gets laid over your face like a death mask

people can recognize you by like a patina of soot

on the thin chapbooks of the butterflies sipping

from a Venus fly trap like the wellspring of the muse.

Young, in a room that doubled for a shrine,

I had an dark genius for making people mad.

Later, as islands emerged out of my magmatic rage,

my fist relaxed and I acquired a grace for making them cry

but that was still the lunar achievement of a journeyman

watergilding children walking skinless through the world,

wrapping their tears in the iridescent sheen of the nightsky

like a lullaby that had compassion for their dreams.

Master of nothing now, working in the creative freedom

of an abyss that entices me out of myself

like nature into the vacuum of an unknown medium

when I’m not a genie on call, I can hear the laughter

of the sacred clowns in the iconic guildhalls

of a little skill, more yielding than a thousand acres,

you can carry around with you for life like the voice

of a nightbird that knows how to penetrate the dark

like the embodiment of a longing that asks for nothing back.

Ripples on the waters of life. Echoes in solitude.

If I shine, I shine without deliberation. If I love

I rise like foxfire from the ashes of the inspiration.

Ragged in the cloak of a noble calling, sometimes

I’m wrapped in darkness like the skeletal kite

of a troubled bat that can hear more than it can say.

The night is not a reward, but there’s never

a credible alibi for not laughing at yourself

for the crazy wisdom of an allegorical starmap

trying to get you to sit still like a fixed star

for your astral portrait in eighteenth dynasty starmud

glazed in Babylonic lapis lazuli and copper from the moon.

The gesture of a Mosaic snake among the pharoah’s magicians,

I wear the jester’s cap of a daylily when the stars

look into my eyes too seriously to see what keeps me burning

after so many light years away from the island universe

on which I was born. Life, the mystery of perishing perennially,

there’s a hidden secret to being clear that supersedes the obvious.

And when death calls for it, I gouge my eyes out

like symbolic jewels embedded in the underworld

so I can envision the eschatology of meanings

trying to justify their ends as if death had embarrassed them

by not making any sense they could cling to for solace in life.

I celebrate the absurdity of the insight death brings forth

like a firefly with the candlepower of billions of stars.

How the mighty must fall to appreciate the magnificence

of their own insignificance raised up like a grain of sand

to keep the pyramids in perspective like studs on Orion’s belt.

I enjoy a hermetic social life among a variety

of prophetic skulls, but even the moon isn’t a palliative

for my solitude when I hallucinate the fate that awaits me

like a lover at every corner of my coffin. Pay the mourners

before the tears on their cheeks are dry. Didn’t I write

the most amazing odes to catch their beauty on the fly?

Didn’t I publish the names of the flowers and the stars

that moved my spirit to give them something

to remember me by like the lyrical elation

of an unpredictable moonrise? Didn’t I emblazon

the heraldry of new constellations with argent starmaps

on the shield walls of exoskeletons in the Burgess Shale?

Wasn’t my madness enough to convince the shore-huggers

of the imminent dangers of an oceanic awareness

beyond the eyes of their circumspect tidal pools?

Came a time when I realized it crucially necessary

to be given up for lost like a heretic with nothing to confess

but forgiveness for the spiritual search parties

in the labyrinths of everybody’s fingertips in order

to decipher a way out of here like Braille hieroglyphs

breaking trail like a cul de sac in a desert of stars.

Don’t the homeless still seek shelter within

the boundary stones of the firepits I left in my wake

like lost and founds along the way I had to take?

Don’t gauge the size of the city by the measure of its gates.

Exits don’t always live up to the expectations of the entrance.

Sometimes the sunset disappoints the dawn.

And then here and gone all things turn around in a heartbeat

like the wind and the sea, and the toxicity of tomatoes,

and all those weathervanes we used to flip through

like telephone books with tenure, set in their ways

like wet cement, appear cumbersomely contrived and shallow

beside the depths of the nightbirds singing

in the shadows of the moonrise they’re drowning

their voices in like stars in the throats of autumn trees

with their hearts in their mouths like the taste of wild blackberries.

PATRICK WHITE

THAT MOMENT OF LOVE WHEN LIFE CALLS TO ITSELF

THAT MOMENT OF LOVE WHEN LIFE CALLS TO ITSELF

That moment of love when life calls to itself

and the summons is answered creatively

and people and things come forth, the stillness

moves and the silence is a song sweeter than words,

the darkness, a shining brighter than the light of stars.

All things are flowers of the mind even

the absence, even the shadows, rooted

like river deltas of lightning in the marshlands

of lilaceous starmud breaking into waterlilies

that enlighten the heart awhile with a beauty

born of perishing, as if all eternity were

included in it, just for a moment, a mystery

beyond wisdom when the words fall away

like petals from the calyx of a star to reveal

the dreamer in the lotus of her emptiness.

Like love, at times, it seems the light

is a kind of impoverished darkness. Bright vacancy,

dark abundance. The candle on the windowsill

of death is a grave-robber opening the eyelids

of the seeds like tiny coffins by the spring.

I’ve seen the radioactive wavelength of the water snake

hunting chlorophyll frogs among the wild irises

harbouring their eggs like the future in the eyes of life.

Happenstantially, it appears. No purpose. No motive.

As if meaning weren’t the end term of what

there is to live for, or why, not even the seeking itself

the grail I’m drinking my life from to green

the ailing kingdom. Love is a happy tragedy

however long it takes the light to get to know you.

To humanize the seeming vastness and indifference

of every star that awakes from its grave within you

like a prophetic skull that’s just had a dream

of a creation myth that leaves the vital heart

of its endless beginning, unexplained. To gentle

these dragons of the abyss with three feathers

of moonlight laid like the three best breaths of life

you ever took, wonder, gratitude, and praise,

each in its own right, the waterbird of an atmosphere

that takes the whole homeless world in under its wing

like a dark mother and gives it shelter for the night

as if it weren’t in her nature not to love

the wayfaring stars that show up at her door

lost, taking their eye off their own light

in a labyrinth of rootfires burning like a starmap

of New England asters to show them where they are.

This is earth where everything we love perishes

like a return journey strewn with plinths and petals

all along the way like the hands of a circuitous waterclock

that renews what flows away on the mindstream

whispering into the ear like the dream of a night creek

to a man walking in his sleep toward a voice he knows

as the woods know the nightbirds. Wake up. Wake up.

We’re almost there.

PATRICK WHITE

MIDNIGHT WATER-GARDENS OF THE RAIN

MIDNIGHT WATER-GARDENS OF THE RAIN

Midnight water-gardens of the rain.

Train-whistle and a singer’s voice.

The darkness seems more musical

and sadder than it was as it falls to earth

like the orbits of earrings and bracelets

when a woman takes off her jewellery

like the windfall of stars from a chandelier

in the mirror of who she appears to be.

Sorrows ripen in the cellars of the heart

like wine waking up from a long dream,

and the ashes of summers that didn’t last

scattered on the wind like mourning doves

from the urns and furnaces of the mind.

The dark silence weeps before the beauty and the love

in the heartwood of yesterday because

of all I’ve been witness to, it never fails

to bring a smile to my face like the tree rings

of the rain or the feel of starmud between my toes

when I take my shoes off out of respect

for the house of life I’m always entering

like a ruined temple that’s been visited by God

in the female form of a life-fulfilling wound.

I resonate on the same frequency as the tuning fork

of the lightning tines of a snake’s tongue

tasting the air to know it’s sweet

with the occult wisdom of a sacred sibilant

caught like the shadow of a wavelength

in the moonlight strewing white rose petals

on a path of thorns. There’s a hidden coherence

in the evanescence of my voice that obeys the laws

of a self-imposed dream grammar that doesn’t have any.

I’m a poet looking out at the rain through a window.

I remember the harsh delights of flesh and blood

that made the purple passages of my solitude

I had learned by heart seem blessed by what

kept cursing them back into life, night after night,

reaching out to touch someone like the other coast

of the great nightsea of awareness you’re sailing

like the shadow of a sundial into the wind.

Light years away, a lifeboat on a shipwreck

that went down with the gold we plundered

like the patch of the new moon over our third eyes

at harvest time when the living was easier

than the songs that would later be written about it

as the ghosts of old bells dripped from the roof.

Enclosures of silence like those taboo sacred spots

you just wander into sometimes alone in the woods

until the dead tell you to get out as if

you were the demon they were driving out of them

like a scapegoat into the wilderness

with unknown sins on your back that bleed

like the stigmata of a black rose gored on its own thorns

or the childhood innocence of experienced bull-vaulters

torn on the horns of the moon and cast aside

like paint rags of love too close to the subject

to see the big picture from inside the allegory.

Less than generous to sour the wine with tears

of bitter vinaigrette. Let the ice sublimate

into cirrus clouds that catch the light of the sun

like silk that feels like the wind on wet skin

the seeds of the starfields we walked through together

cling to like root room in the lonely palaces

of our lunar watersheds peering out through

the eyes of the rain like an abacus of mended necklaces.

PATRICK WHITE  

EVEN HARMLESS AS DAY OLD PORRIDGE

EVEN HARMLESS AS DAY OLD PORRIDGE

Even as harmless as day old porridge no guarantee

of safety anymore, ducking down behind your anonymity

as if the one trick evolution gave you was being overlooked.

Big Brother is here, and it isn’t as if we didn’t

see him coming from a long way off. Reproach

the lighthouses. Swear you’ll keep your highbeams on.

Fall back on believing that sooner or later

everything’s that’s broken now will be amended then.

Comes the Cambrian again to the nexus

of that one atomically-timed moment

when predators acquired eyes and the prey

started armour plating their soft-bodied exposure to life

with oracular exo-skeletons like the cracks

in heated tortoise-shells. Axonic razor-wire

like a crown of thorns on the foreheads of the martyred rich.

Siege skull with a mouth for a drawbridge

it isn’t wisdom to open within hearing

of nano-tech houseflies cruising in squadrons,

observatory eyes slashed open a crack

like a paper cut envelope on a return loveletter

to look at the stars looking back from the other side

of a keyhole that looks like it was made by a bullet.

The darkest, the most exacting. Those whose playbooks

would make indifference seem like a homey word,

and you, just another example of a finely honed

stereotype grazing on your own mirages

in the climate-controlled Sahara desert

in a water-winged hourglass with nothing to drink to

like a shopping mall where the consumer is consumed

in a single gulp of greed. The snake swallows the frog.

Everybody expects to be cheated by their own birthday party.

That’s not honey in the hive. That’s a pinata

of killer bees. Who doesn’t feel swarmed?

Polarized. The laser beams copy writing rainbows

as corporate logos, lobbyists and lawyers worming

like loopholes in the misty covenant of peace

that will follow in the wake of global warming

from sea to shining sea, from Los Angeles,

o city of drowned angels, to the East Coast.

Can you teach a ghost to swim? The earth

redresses the Tao of our conditioned extremes.

Chaos swings its pendulum by the neck

in the secret rendition of a third-world dungeon.

Psychotic shadows of the curious inquisitors

burning the eyes of a telescope out

in the Court of the Star Chamber because

no one puts any credibility in the whisper

of the truth anymore unless it’s shrieking.

Spiders at the loom of the news weaving their nets

into the tapestry of the truth like prayer rugs

and flying carpets over New York in a new sci fi movie

about tourists caught off guard, sight-seeing

the garbage cans of the have-nots in the slums

and favelas of the Land of the Narcotized Dead

floating face down in the lotus garden of their toilet bowls,

or waiting for the bus, on a winter morning, to go clean

somebody else’s house of life without welcome mat of your own.

Paradigms of precisely organized atavistic insects

dressed like heavily eclipsed swat teams of robotic ants

to keep the collateral damage of the helots, the aphids,

the kamikaze heretics that prefer suicide to murder in line

with the corporate foodchain of their modified dna.

And look more like the movie for dramatic effect.

In the biogenetic labs of the alchemical farmers

flowers that were just following orders are on trial

for genocidal war crimes against the bees. Dead fish

on the shoreline of your doorstep after the oilspill

gave its word it would never happen again and again and again

like a skidmark on the dirty laundry of the earth.

Privatized slavers buying prisoners wholesale

like the children of the Visigoths for a little dog meat.

Shoot first. Then ask endless inquiries later

to keep the rest of us informed about what’s happening

to the innocent. Democratic window dressing

hung like garlands of laurel over the sacrificial manneqins

posing in front of the Lincoln Memorial to have

their pictures taken by the NSA. before they cut

the throat of their bullshit like a religious offering

to propitiate the compromised supremacy

of a human bill of rights to a televised prosecution.

Isn’t it so? Or are you still looking into the third eye

of a security camera in your bedroom, calling it

enlightenment though it replays like a snuff film

of serial killers on a red carpet at a cinematic festival

celebrating the loveless obscenity of our prime time inhumanity

to those we’re insulated from by our reality shows?

All the glossy junkmail of the news. Your political views

sponsored by feudal coalitions for a baronial charter

of divine rights against the Peasant’s Revolt.

Monsanto just bought Blackwater. Here come

the Chinese warlords. Black ops for fracking rights

and genetically engineered popcorn for all of Africa.

It takes a lot less than having your picture taken today

to have your soul stolen for good. The stars demoted,

the gods are spy satellites. Smile, you’re on Candid Camera.

Pyramidal hard drives in a desert of data resurrected

like a conspiracy theory about whistleblowing graverobbers

taking a short cut through the afterlife of a cemetery in the dark.

Be sure. Be sure. There will come an end to all of this.

Chaos out of conformative order. Messed up lives

dismembering their childhoods like celebrity voodoo dolls

in psychic theatres of the inane and absurd. Citizen Kane

and Lavrentiy Beria dating the same movie stars.

The scars on the face of the earth caught in a hurricane rose

of razorblades will heal like the shapeshifting cartography

of climate change and lakes in the wake of the storm

will open the eyes of the Sahara again to the water-gardens

of new mirages getting ready to bloom. Doom has its day

and then ends up as homeless as the rest of us

seeking shelter in the shadows of its paranoid rage.

The people are impoverished. The people are bullied and sad.

Repression. Depression. Aggression. The sewers

are roiled by the savage indignation of the bad

coming to the surface of consciousness like snapping turtles

buried in the muck of their starmud, slowly arising

like the moon out of a nightmare it’s wholly possessed by

to redress the sidereal pretentiousness of trumpeter swans.

As below. So above. Eventually. Beware the rage of the mob.

It kills without the imperial niceties of rank and distinction

like the protocol of a furious abattoir looking for signs

of its revolutionary historicity in the Sybilline Books of its blood spatter.

Civis Romanus. Cannon fodder Goths slaughtering Dacians

under the aviary of eagles on behalf of six Mafia families

fighting turf wars all over the known world like Halliburton

and Exxon to get their hands on the silvermines of Moesia,

the black camels of oil in Iraq just like the Wall Street gangs

of New York, promising illegal immigrants hunting, happiness

and home, access to a profiteering cure all for firebombing

incidental villages without hospitals like the ones they came from.

To live palatially in a place and time where you can

grow fat off the garbage of Toronto while

twenty-five million kids a year in a civilization

based on agriculture are mummified alive by starvation.

What to do? Take your fingertips off the keyboard.

Touch a rock, the skin of a lover, a baby’s hair.

Pierce the earlobe of a rose with its own thorn

and hang jewellery you made yourself

like chandeliers of rain and stars as a drop of blood

pearls like a berry of paint from the wound.

Keep the same attitude toward life as oxygen.

Break loves and fishes, if and when you can,

and throw a little salt of the earth of Mother Russia

over your left shoulder on them, and if

sometimes you have to eat bitter, black bread,

throw a little jam on it and pretend it’s

a kind of surrealistic dessert. Common sense, yes,

just enough to get by on, but rely upon your imagination

to show you a back road deeper into the woods

where you were at your most lost the last time,

when all those tears like a flashflood in a mindstream

levelled out like water seeking its own equilibrium

and you saw all those strange constellations

waiting to be named, reflected in the lowest of places.

Remain human, if only counter-intuitively.

Celebrate what’s approximate about you, rounded off,

and how wonderful it is when you put it up beside death

to second-guess what your neighbour means

by nodding your head as if you were dorning

at the Wailing Wall. Remember, arrayed as it is,

illusion too is enlightenment but don’t squint

too long into the sun or fixate on an eclipse

through a glass darkly. Compassion without reason

is wisdom. Reason without compassion

is the antic of a vindictive clown. Blood

your abstractions. Ideologies are black spots

on your heart. What’s that compared to the starmaps

you’re charting as you go along with the wind

and the sea along the coast of your own shining,

and sometimes, deep fjords where the knife went deep

into the heart of the continent. Weep when you need to,

one of the stations of your human divinity,

and when you get to the part where you laugh out loud,

buy a dove on the black market and set it free.

You’ll enlarge the sky you’re walking under that way.

Seek, but know the seeking itself is walking

in your footsteps, finding signs of you everywhere,

and when you do find something intriguing

share it. And let there be parity between your eyes

and the stars they’re getting high on, mindful

that tomorrow’s already been achieved before

the light reveals it. That what you perceive

isn’t idle reflection, or the eccentric delirium

of a dust devil wheeling at a crossroads in a desert

to see if it can dance like a Sufi, Allaho, Allaho, Allaho,

but the whole of creation itself collaborating with

your body and your mind, to see what you make of it all

when it looks through your eyes opening

on a clear mountaintop with a view of the valley below

like the prophetic skull of an observatory

gazing at the splendour of the sidereal insights

on one of the great seeing nights into human nature.

From quantum to quark, life is the substance of revelation,

not concealment, It’s got its Burgess Shales,

its Conservation of Data Principles, its black holes

and bad imitators like hydra-headed hard drives that lose

the singularity, the mystic specificity of things

like the tree of knowledge in a labyrinthine forest

that leaves them as disoriented as the north pole

in a haystack of compass needles rendered trivial

as the eyelashes of the visionary evergreens

seeding the fires of life with the incendiary urns

and ash eating furnaces of the green dragons

resting for the moment in the pagodas of the pinecones

like the crumb of a dream in the corner of an eye

blooming in the flames like the return of wildflowers,

to the burnt lands of a renewable mindscape,

coming up with new creation myths

as if we were giving names, like elders

of the Ojibway at the birth of the multiverse

in the life-mask of a child, names to the stars

like fireweed and raspberries, the perennial ephemerids

that wink like fireflies at eternity as if

a blind eye into the future could see as far

into the abyss as a Cyclops, or a one-eyed liar can

with the petrified cinder of an old growth forest

driven like a silver stake of moonlight

through the heart of a vampire caught red-handed

at a bloodbank for low albedos listening

to the audiotapes of billions of nano mosquitoes

coming to get their blood lines back, bro,

because the lowest in the foodchain always eats first.

Virgo, still a virgin in the brothels of the temple

Love with a passion whomever, whatever, whenever

you’re inspired to, wholly dispossess yourself

like a bat from a burdock, a lucky star

from the flypaper of your unwieldly attachments,

and run your hands through the goldmines

of this harvest of light rooted in the darkness

with every stalk of wheat you sow like an arrow

that already found the bull’s-eye long before

anyone were targeted by hallucinogenic missionaries

burning the libraries of Alexandria and the Incas.

Lord, spare me the deathblows of my enemies, but beat off

my apparitional friends with the jawbone of an ass

and wholly save me like a gnostic parchment of human genomes

from the assassin behind the door trying to save me from myself.

Let me fall asleep in an oracular cave somewhere

among the echoes of my poems and the afterlife

of my paintings done in red ochre for blood,

and the experienced fires of life for indelible charcoal,

and when I wake up like a dream figure in the shadows

not let me know when, why, how, or where.

Just let me marvel in wonder I’m transmorphically here at all

listening to the stars whispering to me in my own voice.

PATRICK WHITE