No more seat slouching sessions
Of meals hastily brought
From fork to tongue
Shoved down the old windpipe
To silence cries from the gut.
No more quick cognitive dissonance
Of upper and lower intestinal moans
To get on to the work of my life.
No- the food is my life’s work;
Today, I eat my bread washed down with gratitude.
Today my mind goes,
As it gnashes its bounty,
To the animals and plants
Whose lives have been sacrificed
To bow down at my plate.
Wheat from the earth,
Picked and processed,
Sorted and bagged,
And eggs from the bodies of warm, woolly chickens,
Plucked, packaged, trucked and delivered,
Driving miles on end from road to store,
Until my hand reaching for it at random
-though nothing is random-
And transporting it home.
The yeast,
The salt,
The trucks,
The miles,
People,
Packages,
And production machines,
To me, in my kitchen,
To mix it,
And form it,
Coat it,
And bake it-
Here it is, bread.
No thought today
Regarding the impact
Ingestion will have
Upon my skin’s outer fabric and its inner fat content.
Instead, today,
My inner cavity of tooth and tongue
Is 2/3 filled with hen,
1/8 rolling from the motion of the truck that delivered the flour,
1/25 dripping of water pumped from pipe to cup,
And a hundred percent
Completely enmeshed
With breath itself,
Which stealthily bypassed windpipe cries and intestinal moans
To offer its blessing.
Today, the bread that has risen becomes my fodder
To continued contemplation to the question of me.
And nowhere in this penultimate universe
Exists any want;
For today, every bite is an ocean of thanks.
Today, I am filled.
