Stupid, Stupid World Full Of Lies
Stupid, stupid world full of lies, self-deceit, greed,
conspiratorial stinging nettles, leeching bills, vampiric,
cutting off the flow of things like tiger-mussels,
hillbilly hippies beating up their girlfriends on crack,
all these egotistic puff ball mushrooms with labial gills
mythically inflated by one night's good rain
into albino planets, people who have more keys to heaven
than they have locks on hell, abandoned school bells
that go on talking to themselves like wandering scholars
light years after the children grew old at their perennial recess
and the moths and the mice and the mildew
keep putting out books epilogues after everyone's
forgotten how to read the signs of their own decay.
Between the horns of the moon that's been thrown
like a goat skull into the wishing well of my heart,
roadie spiders string my harp for me like false eyelashes
in the green room, and the nerves of the mirrors
are shattered into the frayed deltas of the ropes of hope
endangered elephants are trying to climb up to heaven on.
The thin-skinned blissed-out gardenias of Maharajji
are wilting under the eyeshadow of their Mary K cosmetics
as their rainbows grow vicious as vegan dogs
in a spiritual junkyard of razorwire and foodchains
that have overextended their supply lines like the umbilical cords
of kites and puppets and angels on the strings of arachnids.
Too pure for me. I'd be afraid of getting myself on their floors.
Tracking starmud in from the mindstream I've been floating down
from one neuron to the next, one town to another,
like the new moon of an origami swan in a scenic calendar
of apocalyptic moments in the life of a hand grenade
people keep pulling on like the handle of an empty fridge.
Count me among the Andalusian vandals of the delinquent dragons
who keep writing obscene truths in lampblack and terza rima
on the walls where the flamethrowers post their prophecies.
I was born to burnish gold. I was born to dry the eyes
of weeping diamonds. I was born to wire the rainbow bridges
with satchel charges of fireflies and lightning for demolition
so everybody can learn to swim through stone
like glaciers to the other side of their polarized cataracts.
And whenever I look at a house of worship built on quicksand
I've got to laugh like an avalanche of meteors
at the self-serving lustrations of their pretentious extinctions
as the world blazes all around them like a halo of inflammable hairspray.
I've got holy wars of my own to go to that won't be disarmed
by the soft swords of their beeswax candles surrendering
to such a little flame of life at the tip of a limp wick
that trembles with every breath it takes like a feather in a furnace.
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poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
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