Permian Impacts Poem by Patrick White

When I turn the night around in this lonely room
where a thousand books hang like a footnote on the silence
or buckets above the wells of life
from which they cannot drink, sounds we make in the dark
to convince our suffering and fear they do not exist,
or do exist, but in a way that makes us grow
from defeat to defeat like some quixotic advance of the planet
tilting at delusional windmills, I see how the light
has hardened angry minerals in the irises of my eyes
from so much staring into the intimate distances between myself
and the man I like to imagine is always there
being me as I was meant to be
before I drowned in this ocean of mirrors
and saw my life flash before me,
a doomed encyclopedia of pre-natal mistakes.
And who can know the emptiness they return to like a watershed
that daily issues them out of the void,
the eyelids and headlines of a dirty rose of blood?
I could accuse my own tears of infidelity,
I could stand up at a session of misguided stars
moving in the neural circuits of the mind like hanging judges
and point a finger at the black hole that became of the light
above all the fraudulent mangers of damp pubic hair
straining in the dark for monsters and messiahs.
And it's not so hard to confess all the abominations of life and love
I have grown into like the oversized preludes
and outmoded wardrobes of the consummate actor
who died before me in a blaze of burning masks.
I am my own worst heresy
on the racks of the grand inquisitor
who torments me like a lobster of the truth
with igneous pincers and agonies of boiling water
shrieking in the womb. And though
I publicly abhor and abjure
the obstinate acids of my name
until every hour of my life is an oeuvre of contrition,
it's as clear as broken glass or the thorns in my eyes
that I'm the modern miscarriage of an industrial salvation
unspooling like an oilslick from an ark of baffled books.
Is it so strange then that I'm a friend
of astronomical catastrophes and burnt-out lamps,
that I seek a personal delirium
in the wines of razor-wire that sweeten in my blood;
and cannot find a light in anything
that doesn't shine as if it's gone for good?
Savage the days, savage the months, savage
the unrepentant years that have shaped me
like an omen and an ore that fell from the sky
to put an end to the last of a species of one, and worse
the isolation of this long nuclear winter that passes the time
by stringing vertebrae on the rosary of a forsaken foodchain.
And if now I have nothing to say in my own defense,
and will not reluctantly plead with a lynch-mob of shadows
for a remittance of extinction, do you wonder
that I slam myself down like a gavel at the end of every sentence,
the meteoric thunder of an intrusive heart
thrown down like a torch from the heavens
toward a new start?