AND THIS IS THE END OF THE ROAD, THIS IS THE CUL DE SAC

AND THIS IS THE END OF THE ROAD, THIS IS THE CUL DE SAC

And this is the end of the road, this is the cul de sac,

and this is the white root of the black wick,

and this is the last relic in the bone-box of the heretic

who questioned what life is and went up in flames,

and this is death whispering sweetly into the ears

of the Sunday bells blooming heavy and sad

as cast iron morning glory pendulously wondering

why all the bad apples get to fall before they do,

and this is the rope at the end of its barking dog,

and this is the missing link in the daisy chain

around the hanged man’s neck, and this

that gentle daydream that comes to anyone

who’s been left out in the cold long enough

they’re freezing to death in a blizzard of razor blades

with a smile on their face only a buddha could understand.

Penury, my prince, we’ve already flogged the throne.

Poetry, my mistress, the lutes are rattling like dry gourds

dicing like snake eyes for the last few magic seeds

at the end of the tails. And the moon’s even resorted

to milking her own fangs as if she were suckling

a baby Medusa, and the ribs of the truth are competing

like empty bird cages with turkey vultures

for a scrap of roadkill in the pantries of the morgues.

The bookworms have eaten all there was to read,

and the mirages are losing weight as fast as their faith

in the ability of water to sustain them. Down

to the last blossom, the apple trees have been living

on dried bees and the begging bowls of the tapeworms

have been making snakepits of pasta out of themselves.

And this is the drydock of hollow cupboards

that have lowered their voices three octaves below

a skeleton, and the ships jump their plague rats

in a black market where Virgo grinds Spica

like the last stalk of wheat in her hand into

the dream crumbs she gleaned from a harvest of eyes.

The feast is looking for a fatter host. The famine

is cattle rustling the oneiroscopy of the seven lean kind

and Mose’s rod has just cooked the last Egyptian snake

over a burning bush like the leftover shoelace

of last night’s roast boot. Van Gogh’s licking the paint

off his canvases like batter off a wooden spoon,

and Cezanne’s making apple sauce of all his still lives.

Food for thought, and all the geniuses are mindless.

Below the salt, below the echoes of the abyss

in the nihilistic silos for bread. Sticky dregs of the light,

singularities at the bottom of the flagons of black holes

good down to the last God particle of gravity,

I’m laughing at the poetic idiocy of pursuing

an earthly excellence like a fruit fly, Drysophila,

the nectar and ambrosia of the higher things in life.

And given how few loaves and fishes are left at the foodbank,

if I must sup with the devil at the expense

of answering to the angels who don’t eat,

it’ll be the demons who come to the table

with long spoons, and me that licks my fingers clean

after gnawing on this winged foot I stuck in my mouth

like a black farce of the ouroboros I’ve already

eaten up to knot in this noose of nerves at the back

of my head I’m about to swallow like a black walnut

in a single gulp, like a wolf chewing through its limbs

in a leg hold trap that’s gone too long without meals

as it howls through five tercets of a villanelle followed

by a quatrain with two refrains and a pair of repeating rhymes

to express the pain of singing for your supper

on the lowest rungs of the foodchain hanging

the fruits of life on the dead boughs of an art

that’s dying while my heart’s still green.

PATRICK WHITE