The Reason Most People Are Unhappy Poem by Patrick White

The reason most people are unhappy
is that they love their misery.
They cling to it
like a voodoo doll of themselves
they've been poking pins in since childhood.
They derive their identity from it.
They wouldn't know who they were without it.
They drive pins through its eyes in the mirror
to make things clear as rain
and then refusing to go along
with the flow of life
seek shelter in the pain
of never going anywhere.
They cast curses
on fate on God on life on love
on the impure selflessness of blue knowledge
but they're spitting into the wind
and their curses come back on them
like chapter and verse
of an infernal bible
that doesn't command them
to do anything but carry on as they are.
You can look up astonished at the stars
enraptured by a glimpse of the same mystery
that awes the gods themselves
into an unfamiliar silence
and lose the moment
like a butterfly on a chainsaw
as you hear the hiss and snarl of misery
dying and whining beside you
like a snowflake on a furnace
about being down to its last cigarette
in front of all these firing squads
gathered like constellations
against the innocent flame
of a solitary match
that refuses to go out
without fixing the blame
on everything else that shines.
Misery sees a waterlily opening in a swamp
transforming all that decay
like enlightenment
into something brief and beautiful
like earth's answer to the stars
and it's the swamp it remembers
in all its lurid details:
the spider sucking the life
out of the dragonfly
caught in a radiant web
among the treacherous cattails.
Misery holds a grudge against life
for sustaining itself on food
it grows for itself
and breaks like loaves among the poor
to keep things going
whether you taste honey
or bitter ashes on your bread
or brunch with the dead
by giving up hunger altogether
as a protest against
the lavishness of nature
squandering good water on wine.
I remember a poet
from the non-existent good old days
who could cut your throat like a razor
with a sharp dark phrase
and the birds would stop singing
and his girlfriend in the corner
would shudder to think
she would be his next blood-sacrifice
if he were ever to discover
how innocent she really was.
He ended the way he began
according to his own cosmic laws
with nothing left to eclipse
agreeing with Sophocles
that never to have been born is best.
He may have gotten the world off his chest
when he shot himself through the heart
like the last fang of wisdom he had to impart
like a crescent of the moon
that would never be full
like a sickle without a harvest
that cut down everything in sight
just to spite the flowers
but he had to point the gun
at his heart
not his brain
to do it.
And that was that.
He stayed true to his pointlessness
as if that were the point
he had been trying to make all along.
And then the birds broke back into song.