And all I do is eat’

I go to write and all I do is eat;

my fingers find the food and like the way it feels so much

I sometimes think I’ll push it under my nails

so they can have a taste of what leaves their faces greasy.

And when I play tennis I don’t play tennis but eat anything everything

clay and Astroturf and your horrible biscuits,

I shovel it all in with my racket hands and they never seem

to hold enough to satisfy my mouth

which is big enough for countries to be founded in.

Or maybe I find a drink of something

and pour it down my throat like a sculptor filling a mould with

gallons and gallons of floury plaster, filling myself

with whatever I can lay my hundred hands on,

music even, I put it on and let it fill my head

like a gardener filling a bucket with slugs and snails

till they’re so densely packed the weight begins

to crack shells and suffocate those at the bottom,

I can’t get enough, you think I’m not serious but I can’t get

serious enough, in my dreams I’m stripping trees from leaf to root

or giving head with the hunger of an animal in the desert,

burying my face so deep I can see the origins of mankind

and softly desperately gulping away like those awful eels called gulper eels.

I’m addicted to my open mouth, I find stuff and I put it in my face,

my mouth when empty is thinking about being filled with anything,

food drink sex worms Tinder smoke kissing paper anything,

anything I see I shove it in my mouth

and I don’t care how many teeth I lose. I saw a film

of a farm where geese were piled high

and men stuck a machine called the hand of god

in their little long throats and pumped them with grain

till they could barely stand, and this is torture, so why

although there is grain dripping out of my nose and ears

and my hundred hands in bloody twisted knots do I still feel empty

and want you to fill me fill me I’m a sewer

waiting for all the shit in the municipality to come coursing down the drains

into my hungry hungry eager wide wide open yes yes mouth

fill me fill me fill me fill me oh

teach me how to eat myself away and maybe then I’ll rest.

unpublished poem, © Adham Smart 2019, used by permission of the author.

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