Moon Eater

The Moon looks so contemplative, so quiet and concentrated. The woman in the photograph beams outward rather than inward as the moon does. The woman in the photo is a sun painted white, a sun disguised as a moon. Big Cheshire cat grin. Didn’t the Cheshire cat disguise himself as the moon? His grin was the horned moon, or the horned moon was his grin, and he materialized around it humming a little “huma de hum de hum”. The woman with the white face is like that, a sun with the moon caught in her teeth. An eater of moons, moon shaped cookies downed with milk and honey, falling, cascading in sugar cookie crumbles down the dark well of a throat, chased by cool white milk, down down down to places our eye should not see. There is no light in there, down in the woman’s gut, in her moon belly. A tiny crumb being pulverized down in there would look about itself and swear that it was now in the abyss, in the terrible place outside of the world. But it is not the outside of the moon eater. It is the inside of the moon eater that is the strange and dark annihilation of a cookie. The cookie is the inside of the moon eater and within the moon eater there are many divisions, tissues and linings and cell walls. Everywhere of the moon eater is an inside of something and an outside of something else. But a crumb down there in the acid bath of the stomach’s delight would never know it. It would have no idea. It would think, most definitely, that it had gone outside. The interior of the moon eater is so dark, but from its dense surface, light is reflected and we are presented with an image. Ah! Just like the moon itself. A dense body whose surface reflects the light of the sun. The moon give off no illumination of its own. It baths in the sun’s radiance to be seen. Only a dress of light worn so that the children of the sun will know it is there. The children of the sun with their eyes for perceiving light could not recognize the moon without her disguise. The moon, like the moon eater, wears a disguise. Trixie things, moons and the eaters of moons. Scary white things whose insides are black. It would be better to be eaten by a black thing whose insides were light. But how likely would you be to make that choice? If you stood before two doors, one painted black and one painted white, which would you choose? And what if the doors were not the doors of houses but the mouths of lions opened wide, bottom teeth pointed up and top teeth pointed down? Would you prefer to be eaten by the black lion or the white lion? I will tell you a secret; the black lion is made of glass painted on the inside with all the colors of an infinite universe so that when you look upon it, it appears to be black. The white lion is made of plaster so that you do not see its dark insides when you glance at its clean bright surface. I am not going to tell you which lion you should choose. I think I will not even tell you which lion I would choose. I will say, that the white lion is the moon eater and that you are what you eat. Are you an eater of moons, an eater of lions, an eater of cookies, or garbage, or hash? What do you eat and what’s eating you, bite by delectable bite? I’m not saying I know. I’m not saying I don’t. It’s worth contemplation though, worth the quiet concentration of a lunar entity, hung as white horns in a black sky, singing, “huma de hum de hum”.