The Soul's First Job Is Nutrition

I am an envoy of renunciation,
And this is both a historical fact and
A rhetorical choice. The soul needs to eat.

The body needs to surrender to the glass
Fragments that culture shatters, shards, teeth of souls
That tear at the tender flesh to render thought,

The eyes, the black eyes, unseeing and seeing,
Always dying from the top. Who can tell how
These images are formed, notwithstanding that

The wilier, wishful soul of the novels
And notebooks chews its cud, ruminating
On what it is consuming, as if it could

Be said that a body destroyed to transform
A few ideas and transmit them to others
Were not a waste of life. Life is waste of life.