Did you ever read
The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner?
I hope you did, because
I didn’t.
What about Idylls of the King?
I decided I would be my own quing,
and my own beautiful sexy Kristang master.
Pride and Prejudice?
I was too busy fighting for my fucking life
to notice.
The Collected Works of William Shakespeare?
(Actually—
I did read every single damn play in army after I was injured,
though seriously, Henry VI 1-3 could have been so much better.)
Are you insinuating that English literature
is made only out of creature-features,
stories meant to make time out of heathen
passers-by, that we slowly reached for
and devoured?
No, not really.
I am insinuating something else, silly:
I am insinuating that you exist.
Whoops.
Should have read those entrails a little more closely, when you insisted
that you didn’t want me;
and for the record, there are no problems with my entrails.
(I really like, as the Doctor sadly did not say,
the colours of all twenty-three of my psychoemotional kidneys.)
and you still have the gall to say that I should
have thought about it, really.
And my interest, whether intestinal or pancreatic or testicular or arrested in
liver-coloured livery
would sadly, always turn out to be genuine—
aren’t you proud of me?
I tried every last one of the leftovers,
every last devil’s curry;
miraculously,
surprisingly,
and perhaps a little too delicately (I always have a fragile stomach)—
when you look at me with your thousand eldritch abomination eyes
and try to make small of me…
I try to make smoh of you, and fail.
Food, living, dead or cannibalistically brought back to life undead,
was never really
my specialty.