The Glutton and The Master Fruit

 

Last night, just as I was about to dine out
I recognized the Glutton:

covertly catty-cornered, staring with a salacious pout,

and glued to every detail

of the feast for my entrails.

 

I paused, then halted:

famished yet offended, my appetite souring.

How dare he enjoy not only the sight

and smell of my food,

but also find eroticism

in my very act of devouring?

 

My revulsion was overpowering:

I took not a bite

But merely gulped mouthfuls of sucked-up air

Then ‘vomited’ it back out—

an aerophile bulimic—there—

figuring my foodless display would get him uptight.

 

But the damn Glutton wasn’t human,

but a mischievous sprite

who laughed with pure glee at the thought

that I could create an eating disorder with nought.

 

So divine did the Glutton consider

My gastronomic pantomime

That he, too, began in empathetic entrancement

To ‘vomit’ up air with such ungodly retching and heaving

That he caused everyone to stare, raptly disbelieving.

 

The Glutton thus learned from me how to gross

Everyone out at no personal culinary cost.

And, in a instant, all entirely lost

their hunger and that loss was a prize

to the Glutton’s bulging eyes.

 

And then the Glutton stole off into the night

Dreaming of all the uneaten dinners in that diner

Ecstatic with the realization that nothing is finer

(next to pigging out)

than ruining other’s appetites.

It was an incredible summer morn.  I was work-free and laying out in the sun, drinking a glass of wine, reading the first of two selected books, two books being what I would typically read during that summer's average day. 

After an hour or so of reading, I decided to take a break from it.  And lying on the outdoor cot, facing west with the sun coming over my shoulder, I had just set the wine glass down with my left hand on a flat stone and reached to set the book down to my right on a low brick structure, when I felt no assault of pain, but only an immediate and unexpected wooziness. 

I was alarmed: something had changed.  My mindset was rapidly shifting, my metabolism seemed bothered, and my time perception was drastically expanding.  I tried to stand up, but collapsed in the act to my knees.  Wtf?  Of course, wtf!!  Then I saw it: an insect-like entity as I had never seen before (or since) docked on my right forearm with its proboscis injected into my skin, sucking? injecting?, who the hell knew.  It was about two inches long and amazingly thin, with banded alternating black and yellow stripes and mosquito-like wings.  And it was seemingly sucking my consciousness away.

"Why? What?"  were practically the only challenges I could mentally self-mount before the trip kicked in.  And I mean painless, psychedelic, visionary floating imagery type-trip. Yet I did have enough remaining sense to pick the creature off me-and it departed to my picking without protest.  In fact, it seemed lifeless as I put it into a nearby empty glass jar which I inverted on a perfectly flat piece of sidewalk sandstone.  Of course, my fading, delirious thoughts at the time were that if this bite were poisonous, perhaps having the bug would assist in treatment. So the bug sat motionless with its wings spread under the jar as I laid back down on the cot watching it until I passed out…or didn't care anymore…I can't remember which.

Dreams and hours later, still on the cot and sunning, I awoke feeling strangely refreshed. After but a moment's disorientation of the "where-am-I what-am-I-doing" sort, my recall of the scenario returned and I thought-sought: the bug!  But when I looked at the inverted glass jar, the bug was gone!  Wait, its body was gone, but the wings remained! Had the jar been moved?-no.  Was the sandstone anywhere uneven so that something could have gotten in to eat it or it could have crawled wingless out?-absolutely not, it was a perfect quarry seal.  And the translucent shimmering wings were still arrayed in the exact life position in which I left the bug, but its body had vanished!

OK…psychedlic bug…body mysteriously gone *poof*…you tell me what it was???