gluttony & loyalty

“Lie down with dogs and rise up with fleas,” is how the saying goes, but who says you’ll
	  rise up at all?
I’ve always felt camaraderie with the starving dog—
ravenous, desperate, and brutally insatiable.
Like them I want to sink in my teeth and feel
	  give.

My dreams are just sensation:
blood on my lips, meat bursts between my teeth, a metallic tang sliding
	  down my throat.
Proof of life in warm flesh and blood.
I’m always searching when I wake, to recreate my imagination. I bite
	  every hand that feeds me,
but they all turn to dust on my tongue.

Grit coats my gums and lines my throat. It settles into 
	  a bottomless pit
that resides somewhere between my stomach and chest.
It is the thing within me that longs for warmth—warm words, warm blood, warm meat—consuming
	  whatever provides it.

When handed bones I pick them clean, savoring the marrow, gnawing the remains—
	  in return for bones, they get me. 
A loyal dog, offering blind obedience. No matter the task my loyalty is theirs, 
	  exchanged for a bone and
a place at their feet. Pat my head and tell me I’m good and I’m hooked, crazed at the thought. I gorge myself on 
scraps, anything offered, I reorder my   existence around the taste.
Tell me what to do and it will be done—unquestioning and promptly, with the eagerness of a hound, 
    the ecstatic zeal of a worshiper.

Whet my appetite and I’ll hand over the leash myself.