NOT EVEN THE LIGHT

NOT EVEN THE LIGHT

Not even the light of the stars

shining like the keys to the ancient love-letters

bound among the secret jewels

of the queen of heaven

penetrates me as deeply as you do.

The planet wheels into the night

bearing its burden of humans

murdering each other

to enforce one state of ignorance

upon another

as the rabid bees

strafe the demented flowers

on the far side of the world

for enriching their radioactive pollen,

convinced in their madness

more honey than blood will flow from the wound.

I walk by myself

along the brittle banks of a frozen stream

among the detonations of the cattails

waiting like Napoleonic cannoneers

to stoke the charge of the next volley.

The snow in the sunset

is stained a spectral apricot

that disappears like breath on a cold window

and the sky is vast with my insignificance.

Two or three decades of life left,

if I’m lucky,

and though I have tried to use my time

to leave a gift for someone I will never meet,

long ago I realized

there is no way of assessing

what they will find

after the coffin closes like an eyelid

on this long, dark, radiant brevity

that once shone like the moon

in the ores of my blood.

Like the wandering of this rivulet

my heart has always been

a pilgrim without a shrine

and the direction of prayer has encompassed all

like a man getting up off his knees

and walking through an open door

to drink from the cup of his lover

in the shadows of the autumn willow

that sways like kite-tails

from the flights of fire

she ignites among the stars

that gather in the dark like strangers

before their own ghosts.

What the wind

has torn away from me like apple-bloom,

like poems, like smoke and leaf, like skies,

like tears and blood and faith

it has replaced

with these deeper revelations of you

that hang like a windfall of scarlet bells

from the branch of a dead tree in winter.

The wine of your life and light

has matured in the ferocious crucibles of the sun

and you have been poured out

like the passion of a sword

to cleave the stone of my heart

with these truant rivers of wounded silver

that flow through me like blood.

A young breeze

tries to hone the edge of its blade

on the rising moon

as a black ribbon of water

runs like a snake of oil

between the enclosing jaws

and cataracts of ice,

tiny wavelets scaling its skin

scintillant with the small commotions of stars overhead.

The bush wolves

have been nosing for muskrat

and you can almost taste the steam

rising from hot meat on the air.

I squeak like a pulley through the virgin snow,

following the banks of my own meandering,

owing nothing of myself to anyone,

wholly my own solitude,

as I pass through the gates

of the enclosing darkness

trying to enter the abyss and the mystery

of what I have lived so precariously

over the last sixty-three years,

what it means, if anything,

to be a human among these paper birches

on an island in the stream,

looking up at the intimate unattainability

of the stars,

knowing you are growing old,

that death is more populous with friends

than life, that love

has sloughed you so many times

like a viper’s skin,

like the phases of the moon,

like a shrine of smoke and ashes,

that the phoenix hesitates

to robe itself in the full glory

of its former plumes of fire.

My mother will die soon.

I must say it,

voice it in my blood

to be able to bear it

and my children are clouds in the world

that no longer look for their reflections

in the eyes of the lake they arose from

as if they were merely breathed out.

And how in any god’s name

can a man define the absence

he has grown to be,

except he standardize his own spinal cord

as the only measure of loss

he has to go by?

And even after

all the millennia of my walking,

standing up,

I’m still only six feet closer to the stars

though my mind can embody all of space

in a solitary thought.

And the deep, inner silence

in the empty throne-room of my heart

where even the most profound events of my life

are seen to be ultimately no more

than the antics of a jester

playing with shadows,

turns out after all to be

just another mode of weeping.

It takes a lifetime

for a drop of water

to gather the courage to fall

from the tip of a blade of stargrass,

and the tongue has tears

the eyes know nothing of.

I admire the cool crimson

on the brushes of the ground willow

as they try to catch my likeness

on the ice-primed canvas of the snow,

but suggest

to portray me as I lived

they need to be loaded with blood not paint.

Like the moon

I have worn the same blossom

as a face

for years now

and I still don’t know the fruit

that ripens beneath it;

whether my life has sweetened

in orchards of light,

or black dwarf of the forbidden apple

on a dead tree,

I taste like a full eclipse.

And what could it change even if I did know?

When the diaspora of my starseed

breaks bread

at a harvest of thorns;

who is the host

and who is the guest

and who asks for a menu?

And no matter how far from home

the journey takes him,

whether down a dead-end alley

or further than the stars

was there ever a man

who didn’t walk to his own funeral

like a bell

looking for any beginning

that might not be lost in the end?

Or does the snake

that takes its tail in its mouth

as a gesture of eternity

eventually end up swallowing

its own head

like this stream before me

making its way to the sea?

I stepped across a star sill

through a vertical door into life

and in the leaving of it

I shall knock from the inside

on a door that’s horizontal

to continue my descent toward earth

down a ladder of thresholds;

and what began so earnestly

among family and friends and lovers

will be concluded by a stranger

who will wear my name like a gravestone.

But here among the tangle

of these fallen trees, their roots

fleshed out

and washed like a corpse

by the water and the snow,

Venus peers through the fingers

of the branches above

where two crows have paired

like quotation marks

around the hearsay of the night

though I am left speechless

by the random beauty of the scene,

as if my voice had been released like a bird

into its own most intimate, inward vision

and that vision were everywhere you like the sky

it disappears into like I do

everytime my heart is opened

like one of the lockets of time

and I stare into your eyes

and the universe stares back

as you breathe out the night with all of its stars

and then I breathe you in

just as a golden feather of the moon

lands without a ripple

or unravelling wake

on the mirror of these lonely, black waters

I have followed deep into the darkness

like the urgent secret of my own lifestream,

and I know it’s you. I know it’s you.

PATRICK WHITE

O IGNEOUS ROSE

O IGNEOUS ROSE

O igneous rose, are you the furnace or the urn of the butterfly?

Or should I ask the vatic wind which pyre is mine?

Will I be be food for the stars again, will I mulch

the dark matter of the roots with my remains

or will my ashes retain some semblance of the light

like the ghost feeling in the heart of a spiritual amputee

or linger among archetypes like fossils in the Burgess Shale

that haven’t reached their full potential yet?

Not Hell, not Heaven, not Hades, Sheol, Tartarus

Dis, Avernus, Jana, Jahannum, Nirvana, Samsara,

or the great abyss where nothing is even in the slightest,

and presence, and absence, and time aren’t even

anachronisms of their past lives. I’m not going

anywhere when I die, because death is not discontinuous

from life in the known universe, though one’s a lifeboat

and the other’s what you need it for to stay afloat.

Wherever your mind walks in unison with your heart

deep in emotional thought without too much attention

to where you’re going, you break trail like a river

and the stars start flowing into your alluvial fields

and the green mountains you left walk with you

all the way into the pyramids like the source of the Nile,

not tombs of death, but tombs of life pointing like starmaps

to the indelibility of your afterlife in Orion

as the scion of a great house of mystic hunters.

I’ll be here. Just behind your eyelids. Like a dream

I’m having until things come true again for the sake

of distinguishing my extinction from one bone to the next

like yarrow sticks throwing away their crutches

like the hands of a clock to read the Book of Changes

to see what’s bubbling up like the multiverse from the bottom

and every eye of air, each a complete science unto itself

or an occult art, where it’s been fully realized

chaos is the root of all imagination

even when it’s writing Horatian odes and haikus.

Chaos is as smooth as Hermes writing his own flightplan

with his heels, and where he arrives, is as much of a message

as the word he holds in his mouth

like coin for the ferryman in his moonboat

at the end of the long wharves that are the last to see us off

to the other side of everywhere. O come now

surely you didn’t think life was going to let you off

its prophetic hook that easily before it got

its last crescent snagged like a koan in the mouth

of the golden fish that thrives in the dead seas of the moon

that reels it in for questioning, only to throw it back?

Everybody satisfied with the answers for awhile

until the questions get bored with hanging around

like mere coathangers, and bite off more of you

than they can chew again. No more than a windowpane

can hold the whole of the sky the way any drop of rain can,

can you without washing the dye out of your tears like an iris

that encircles the blackholes like rainbows around a wishing well

where what you see is what you wished for from the beginning

because chaos conforms to any vision of reality and delusion

that conceives of it as a feature of the conditioning mind

that shapes it like a simulacrum of the inconceivable.

So the same well that the stars and fireflies look into

holds a mirror up to them like a reflecting telescope.

And all it takes is a quarter gram of vaporized aluminum

to silver the whole universe with a prism and a drop of dew

trembling in the web of a spider mount like a psychic butterfly.

Chaos and cosmos. Igorance and enlightenment. Reality

in contradistinction to delusion. Life and death yoked

like two oxen to the oxymorons of the helical star wheels

that dance like Sufis at the naves of their retrograde crossroads

to weird what direction to go in like witching sticks

in the mouths of the dragons that undo the locks

on the gates of the rain with skeletal keys of lightning.

I shall be here. Where the light and the water

illuminate the blossoms and quench the roots of things

at the intersection of time and the timeless where

there’s no more need of religion than there is crosswalks

or moonboats and ferrymen to the other side of the river

that know what season it is by the colour of your sails.

I’ve always flown under the skull and crossbones

like a sea wolf that didn’t evolve back into a whale

howling in the mountains on the moon in a savage agony

of the longing to live yourself to death as intensely as you can.

The sublimity of laughter that makes the clown profoundly sacred.

That beatifies the candles like eyes in the unapproachable darkness.

That takes one world after another in hand

like a party balloon and lets the clowns and magicians

twist it into the shapes of worlds within worlds

where the ground of being is always and only

the liberated exercise of their creative imaginations.

And every world we pass through the sum of all

we’ve imagined it to be, and a little bit more

just to keep the mystery from being perfectly contained

in the three and a half pounds of starmud we call a brain

and root our shining in it like flowers gone to seed.

Make a muse of the wind, or a church out of a rock, the same,

or pitch a tent or a pyramid on the dunes of the shifting stars,

or in a nunnery of desert mermaids who gave up singing to take vows

make your obeisance to the unknown with laughter, grace, and style.

Best show in town, and the ticket was free, and who

so ungrateful they could leave the table that fed them, fouled?

Holiness isn’t a threshold where you take your body off

at the door and separate your mind from the Braille of the flesh

you need fingertips to read just as you need eyes in your blood

to see a lover’s heart from the inside out. True holiness

is not holy. It’s not fool proof. It’s not stake-prone.

It doesn’t pour honey all over your head in the morning

just to feather you with doves and expect you to glow

like secret diamonds in the dross of the ore. Listen.

You can hear the light walking across the grass.

The snakes are teaching their occult wavelengths

to the shadows of the trees leafing in the moonrise like veils.

There are mad poets all through these pathless hills

waiting for inspiration like a singing coach

to raise havoc among the high notes of the bush wolves

that leave you guessing what they’re really mourning for

that’s actually missing. Grains of sand,

we grow like pearls and stars and expanding universes

beyond the limits of what constrained us yesterday.

The seed splits its cotyledons like Solomon’s baby

and scarlet runners burn like heretics at the stake

in an auto de fe of enlightened immolation

of serpent fire running up the spine to get to the stars

as a circumpolar constellation with small flammable flowers

before the last watch of the night blows them out at dawn.

PATRICK WHITE

MURDER ME AGAIN WITH YOUR VOICE

MURDER ME AGAIN WITH YOUR VOICE

Murder me again with your voice,

the moon, your maculate heart, the weapon of your choice.

I am space, light, water, air, stars beyond your reach.

Meteor showers have been looking for my species for years

And still I thrive like glass eyes with real tears,

in the shadows of your amorous extinctions.

You can snuff a thousand votive candles out.

You can desecrate the shrine where I bury my feelings

like the small bodies of gentle birds

beside the ashes of the dragons that burnt out

like solar flares returning to the source.

You stab at the wind. You can try to ruin the sun

with a pettiness that isn’t worthy of the moon

that sends no night bird out to look for you

though my longing says you’ve been missing for years.

Nothing against you, nothing especially for,

though I thought I saw for a moment Bailey’s Beads

peeking through the lunar valleys of your last eclipse.

And there was a time I’d trade two of my fingers

just to have a taste of your lips again as they were

when the apple orchard covered your nakedness

in the blossoms of the first drafts

that couldn’t improve on you by revising anything.

Come the first time right, or better not come at all

and they fell, each more perfect than the last.

Now it’s like French-kissing a voodoo doll

with pins through its lips that makes everything you say

the martyr of a brutal kind of unspoken curse.

Make it worse, if that’s all you’ve got left to feel.

Get it out. Oxyrhyncus Jesus says that’ll save you.

I’m an old ghost. Do you really think

you’re my first exorcism? Boo. I’m gone

just like the mist off a morning lake,

just like a gust of stars in the lens of a telescope

that can bring you close, or set you at a distance

just like that piece of tinfoil you wrap

like skin around your heart as if you were saving

some kind of vegetable in the cold shining

you think of as the Pleiades on a binge of light.

Screech, shriek, rave, rake your fingernails

down a blackboard like an ice age in a rage,

like a glacial striations cut into shale

and ambush the mammoth, the sabre-tooth, the dire wolf

of twelve thousand years ago when you stole

the water out of their mouths and returned nothing but dust

like you take the words from mine now

that you’ve uprooted the garden of your own.

Carve on me like a bone if you must, break my skull

like Pangaea into a synarthritic jigsaw puzzle of continents

and I’ll do nothing but diversify my species.

I’ll turn the scars in my starmud into calendars and alphabets

and wait for the next golden age like honeysuckle

tangled in a cedar fence after a storm

that strikes at itself like sheet lightning,

after your apocalypse has finished venting itself.

You’re a white peony, not a wounded rose with thorns,

though you both shed the moon in common

to get down to the withered jester’s cap of the star

hiding like a spider under your eyelids.

You kill me and you kill me deeper into life

not because it’s me you hate, but what I refuse

to hate about you as a coward who turns her back

at the sight her own blood on her razors and wrists

and runs like a river system on a starmap

toward the emergency exits of the red giants

even as they’re imploding under their own exhaustion

who promise to suckle you on the dream milk

of the poppies who opiate you into believing

you’re twice as deceiving as death in Aleppo,

racially profiling the stars in infra red for the Gestapo.

What a silly girl you are, to expect a firing squad

to show up for your rescue, every time you click

your ruby slippers like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz

and tiny eyes emerge from the gigantic size

of the blackholes in your deathmasks like gnats

swept up like stars in your stillborn tornadoes on the moon.

It takes more than a snakepit to make someone an oracle.

However you enrobe it in incense and drugs

and mollify your fear in an exchange of syringes.

More fangs on a hydra-headed Medusa than there are

crescents of the moon lactating with antidotes

as if to say the cure is in the heart of the disease.

Let all those boyfriends you stole like corpses

from a graveyard, believing you were the artistic genius

who was mistress of their vital organs, rise from the dead

as if they’d finally learned to stand up to you

and making a move on your surgical flesh

say, hey, now, mistress, come lie down with us

and see, for yourself, what a heady lover death can be

when you don’t take your cliches so seriously

you’ve rewired your waterlilies to the stars

until they all sting like superclusters of jellyfish

tasing you with the acid rain of your own tears

like rootfires of desire blossoming underground

without a flower to speak of or break through anywhere

you could point to and say, there, I grew that out of love

as if I weren’t even trying all that hard

to stand here alone, alive, and beautiful as I am

not as an alibi for dying, but as an act of life

as indelible in its absence it is when it’s here.

So go your own way with blood on your hands

and blessings on your head as you wish.

And take a last parting shot at the stars

if you want the last word

as you stand like a likeness of yourself

like a commission you’ve always had done

by every doorway you’ve ever stood in like an easel,

and step into a smaller realm than the one you’re leaving

as if your eyes were too small for my windows

when you hurled yourself against them

like a housefly against a mirage in an hourglass

being emptied and filled at the same time.

And, yes, I will cry for you with deep regret

I couldn’t die for you any better than I did,

and you couldn’t live for me

just for the cheap thrill of it.

And then I’ll wipe my tears on my sleeve

where my heart used to be

and make my comic entrance into the next world

laughing like a sacred clown at the sublimity

in the enlightened madness of it all

as you back up like a tragic exit into yours,

troubled by the punch-lines in your nightmares

you never got.

PATRICK WHITE

WAITING TO SELL A PAINTING

WAITING TO SELL A PAINTING

Waiting to sell a painting.

Cigarettes coffee food gas rent canvases paint

and if anything’s leftover

I’ll hang on to it just to walk down the street

with a little more human dignity

than I did last night.

At least once or twice.

I can see something glimmering on my event horizon

but I’m not sure if it’s a mirage or an oasis

A mirage is a dangerous hope

in this desert of stars

and an oasis

is an Artesian spring with skulls

that punctuate the caravan

like the end of one lifelong run-on sentence.

A place to dogpaddle for the rest of the night

and go skinny-dipping with the moon

like an uninhibited waterlily

before I’ve got to move on in the morning

and do it all again

like the ghost of a dandelion gone to seed.

It almost feels like Sunday outside

but I’m afraid of a black spring.

I should act my age

and stop trying to express myself

like a job description for the poor.

How much depends

upon a knock upon a door.

When God finds out

you’re an incorrigible idol worshipper

he endows you with an imagination.

But what I don’t like most about God

is that he never lets another god go first.

The least are last because the best are worse

and everybody’s cursed

by their place in line on the foodchain.

Wheat is sweet

but meat cursed Cain.

Two cans of tuna away from extinction

and a universe shy of survival

someone else can have mine.

I’m out of here like Van Gogh’s ear.

Or maybe it’s time to start eating my still lives.

Painter with chives and a bowl of fruit.

Or turn my whole world upside down

like a bluejay ass up to the winter wind

picking the last of the seeds

out of the mouth of a dejected sunflower

with its head hung down like a streetlight

wondering why even its own feet

pulled their roots up like bootstraps

and walked out on it.

Sunflowers were good enough for Van Gogh.

He ate them like chromium yellow.

He painted potatoes.

He wore his stomach on his palette

and I’ll bet there was a whole gallery inside of him

that no one ever knew about.

I try to focus.

But I’m not a lens.

I weigh the cosmic sublimities of a moment ago

against the feather of my soul

in the scales of the jackal-god of the dead

who asks me what happened to the rest of it.

And I point to a wishbone and a clean carcass.

But hey as the neighbours would say

at least it’s not Ethiopia

and I think how strange it is

that people feel better knowing

there’s someone else worse off than they are.

We’d both sit down and eat these feathers

if we had any tar.

Or even Mars black.

You can elaborate all the aesthetic theories you want

and go on about the integrity of the picture plane

and keep things flat

or ride the new tide

of neo-retro-representationalism

like a tax return to sex

because when things go flat

there’s no up or down after that.

Whether your hanging antibacterial watercolours

in a disinfected gallery

or trying to convince the lightbars

the flowers in your garden scenes

are realer than real

all art

as it always has been

is hunting magic.

The lean looking for the fat

the way you paint

from thin to thick.

The mind is an artist.

Able to paint the worlds.

And keeping meat on your bones

is a kind of textural perpective.

I blue my hills

and establish my point of disappearance.

Trying to see the world in masses

when you’re trying to flesh

an underpainting out

when you’re hungry

is like trying to put tits on a skeleton

but I do my best to paint a bison whole

on the wombwall of the great mother

who keeps the pantry full

without getting hung up on it horns

like some amateur matador

who draws blood like a rose

but ends up being gored

by the demons in details of its thorns.

Back in those days

when everyone was African

there were roving bands of sacred painters

who kept everybody well fed

not by breaking loaves and fishs on a hillside

like a foodbank offering celestial returns

on earthly deposits

but painting the local wildlife in a cave

with carbon you sprayed from your mouth

like burnt bread

to block out the shapes of the negative space

that surrounded your prey

like the contents of an empty stomach.

Or an open hand.

What’s the difference between

braining mammoths in a cul de sac

using the gifts the great mother gave you

to live with cunning and style

and a hunting spear with a good eye

you can wield like a paintbrush

when you’re out in the bush upwind

trying to pick out the highlights

like the vital organs of a Grant’s gazelle?

Mine are Promethean.

I’m chained to a rock.

My liver grows back

like a magic mushroom at night

and the vultures are gathering

for a communal feast

like surgeons in Renaissance black

trying to explain my cadaver

to the operating room in a Rembrandt painting.

And I’ve already eaten my heart

like that of a noble enemy

to enjoin my art

to be brave and steadfast

behind this shieldwall of paintings

positioned like a Viking

on the ridge of another landscape

that keeps folding like a smalltown gallery

that was good at tactics

but didn’t have a strategy for defeat

other than to run like Naples yellow.

I was raised by a sixpack of wolves

like Romulus and Remus

by the same bitch mother

that littered Rome

high in the wild

to howl at the moon

coming up through the trees

of my last wildlife painting

like a lunatic

with more freedom in his crazy heart

than the American constitution.

It’s getting late.

The emergency can’t wait

but the reprieve doesn’t know

what it’s like to be a clock on terminal row

with its own death on its hands

praying for a last meal.

It’s easier to be more casual about time than death

when you’re not holding your breath

trying to digest it

as if you were down

to your last stale biscuit of ghostfood.

But trying to get to the moon

in a bubble of hope

is Apollo Thirteen

without life support.

Ground control to Major Tom

I’ve left the solar system

like a one night stand with a comet

that fell from my lightless halo

to make a hyperbolic pass at the sun.

I’ve gone gone gone altogether gone beyond

to catch up with a fat buddha

who makes a good living

poaching in the deerparks of Benares.

Given the nirvanic quality

of my enlightened life in art

I figure I know as much about emptiness as he does.

I’ve eaten as many desires

swallowed as many fiery swords

like hurtful words

in the marketplace.

What’s so bad

about having people

rub their noses on a full belly

for good luck?

I’ve meditated myself into a coma

as often as he has

trying to get more plenum into my life

than void

trying to turn nirvana into manna

trying to squeeze milk

from a philosopher’s stone

as hard as a nipple on the tit of a Gorgon

that broke her baby teeth on granite.

I’ve got the rainbow body of a Tibetan rinpoche

whose corpse knows how to evaporate like light

but there’s no pot of gold at the end of it

and no word from God

like the arc of a covenant

he intends to keep.

I haven’ been chosen.

It’s getting late.

No one’s coming

to buy my passion

for the Zen trinity

of land water and sky.

No one wants to buy my starmud

like a third eye

and hang it up in their living room

like the original constellation

for the thirteenth house of the zodiac.

And the way I feel about death and time

whenever I paint a sunset

and put Venus in it

to express my gratitude for sex at least

when the lights went out

on those dark nights of my soul

and the music was over

and all that was left

was flesh and wine

lingering in the west

as if there were still time enough to shine

all that

the intensity

the mystery

the ambivalence

not worth a dime.

A man lives to eat to be hungry.

Like the vultures at my liver.

And all for what?

For stealing a little fire to lighten things up?

I’m this phoenix of a heretic

addicted to a stake

because I have a creative desire

to be spiritually and materially fulfilled

by swallowing these hard-boiled bird-brained cosmic eggs

until I sprout feathers in the flames

and rise up reborn

like a green-winged fern

from the ashs of a forest-fire.

I once lived on Jerusalem artichokes

and pickled fiddleheads

that tasted like the sour notes

of vinegrette violins screeching

like fingernails down a blackboard

for a whole month

when I lived organically in the country

painting en plein air with the New England asters.

And every September

late in the month

the Ojibway would leave food and tobacco

at the eastern door of my burial hut.

Until my bones were dust

they couldn’t free my ghost.

After that

thanks to the transmigration of souls

in the bodies of birds

I could get around like a Canada goose

heading south

or back to the West Coast

where I’m originally from.

Now I’m stuck here

like a deflated birthday balloon

or a used condom

waiting for someone to come

who isn’t.

And doesn’t have a clue

what that means to me.

How the universe will change shape overnight

and space will turn its empty pockets out

like blackholes and belly-buttons

full of lint and tobacco crumbs

and all my energy will intensify into dark matter

multiplied by the squared velocity of light

leaving the theatre in panic on the first night

I asked the audience to put itself in my place

and try to imagine

just imagine

just once for my sake

what it’s like to be me

trying to hold a mirror up to nature

like a moonlit lake

in full lotus

meditating on a koan

with my life in great doubt

hoping to break it open

like the sound

of one hand knocking on a door

in an earthquake.

But it’s been my experience

there’s more enlightenment

in the twisted wisdom

of the demented fortune cookie

at the side of your plate

that insists it’s a seashell

worth listening to

on a deserted beach somewhere

life isn’t waiting on a doorbell

than there is in the great ball of doubt

I’ve swallowed like the cosmic glain

of a petrified Pterodactyl egg

that hasn’t got the beak

of a Rinzai master

to break through its shell

with a single liberating shout.

Katsu!

Cat soup!

and put an end

to the pain in my gut

by eating me from the inside out.

The thing I like most about fortune-cookies

compared to koans

is that after you’ve heard your fate.

The buyer’s late.

You can always eat the messenger.

Half the world is grass.

The other half is grazing.

Grass turns into grazer.

Grazer turns into grass.

How can life be a food chain

if it’s always got its ass in its mouth?

If you are what you eat

and you eat nothing

who are you?

Where’s your i.d.?

Put an x next to the zero

beside your name

and move on.

Life isn’t a chain

it’s a food circle

and I’ve got

more wheels of birth and death in me

than Ixion in hell

or the rain.

The mind eats the thought.

The heart eats the feeling.

The eye eats the picture.

The ear eats the word.

The landlord eats the rent.

The Christians eat God.

And the world goes to bed at night hungry.

And I’m the last scarecrow standing

who mastered birds like words

to scare them off

but wasn’t prepared

by any stretch of the imagination

or higher education

or this life in art

for the famine and locusts

that ate Egypt.

If you are what you eat

and life’s got its tail in its mouth forever

like a snake

then the opposite must also be true.

You are what eats you.

I’m consumed by a hungry heart

with an appetite for life and light

as big as the universe.

I set the table

like the composition of a still life

and I eat my own

like the stone Cronos ate

in place of Zeus

so Zeus wouldn’t take

Cronos’ place

in line at the foodbank.

I don’t know who to thank

for what I’m not about to receive

but you can see it on my face

like a blackhole

that hasn’t tasted a star in weeks.

My life in art

is a cannibal

that says grace

over an empty begging bowl.

No sale.

I stick a fork in it

and swallow me whole.

PATRICK WHITE