Ants and Sharks
For A. B.
An ant devours a larva, in accord
with nature, and a child then eats the ant —
it burns on the tongue. Curiosity
always burns. On Paradise Beach in Goa,
a shark will eat the child, but when God sees,
he'll catch the shark, just as he grabs a rat,
a tigress, elephant. The poet in his room
will then eat God. He'll feed on everything.
He is a monster like a boar that bloats,
excretes. He feeds on paper. If you let
him in, he'll find your dreams, love's traces on
the sheets — he'll steal what's holy, masticate,
grow pasty flesh, poisonous fur. It's enough
to touch him or brush by on accident.
Notes
Where D. H. Lawrence’s Mystic demanded sensory presence to taste the cosmic earth within a single fruit, Tomasz Różycki’s Ants and Sharks launches us into an unsparing, recursive food chain where predator and prey escalate until the poet himself consumes God, dreams, and reality whole. This grotesque metamorphosis of the writer into an insatiable, bloated monster exposes the predatory engine of artistic creation, proving that literature operates as the ultimate metabolic parasite—masticating sacred intimacies and human love into raw ink and paper. It turns August’s theme of Feast toward its darkest, most carnivorous psychological extreme, reminding us that nothing on earth or in heaven escapes the ravenous appetite of the solitary mind waiting to feed. #poetry #tomaszrozycki #feast #august #antsandsharks