You Don't Need To Tell Me You Don't Care
You don’t need to tell me you don’t care, not caring
is an environmental condition since humans became
too dangerous to trust their own minds as the world,
let themselves be morning doves in the phoenix-fire of the sumac,
or a light within a light like a planet in the dusk,
the pink lilac of Mercury, the flashing white
gardenia of Venus. Killing only lets you be
one thing else
after you’ve deleted all the rest. Not caring
is the shape of a final heart, the rose recast by the minerals
as stone, cell by cell, nest by nest, petrified
by the cuckoo whose young shoulder the eggs of its host out
like refugees that take over the government
that gives them shelter. Not caring
is an ancient battlefield in the morning
where crows and old women, idiots, wretches, dogs
plunder the dead lying like islands in the mist,
a cemetery of maggots that froze before
they could finish eating the horse. Not caring
is deciding to live without punctuation
because everywhere you went something got in your way
like crosswalks or streetlights, your desire for precious metals,
to drink the silver pure, frustrated everywhere
by the corroded goblets and encrustations
of people who smiled like ores and tons of granite. Not caring,
is a leftover of porous slag and a gaping quarry,
and the gifts of not caring are always accidental
and come wrapped in the skins of old enemies, a relic of fangs
that fell out like the phases of the moon
when the new ones with their upgraded toxins appeared.
You don’t have to tell me you don’t care,
I’ve lived under glaciers long enough to know
the knives of the small arctics that plunge through the heart
like kingfishers never cry; I know
the striations of stone eyes
that leave their runic watermarks
like scars and coats of arms on a shield, how
the polar caps can descend down over a skull
for thousands of years and the people revert to hides.
Not caring is a moth-eaten charter
of inalienable human blights;
chained like a telephone book to the left side
of a junkie Medusa that sold Pegasus to a riding academy
for the last hit to take off her head
long before Perseus showed up like a rehab centre.
Not caring is a way of saying
the world has let you down like an elopement
you once waited for all night at a window
when windows were made of water,
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poem by Patrick White
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