–an epic of weird and visceral gastronomy
The abyssopelagic stillness murders sunlight, and breathes a banquet.
Four tables stretch beyond sight,
Heavy with brine.
On their writhing quadrivium, geometry forgets itself.
There is a sound of sibilance,
A hiss of hunger,
A soft C shifting sour.
The deipnosophist arrives first,
Smiling a diaphanous curtain of etiquette.
He speaks of marrow broths
boiled from the bones of limerent saints,
of matutinal gluttony beneath blood-orange dawns.
He does not eat.
He only tells.
With incendiary words,
searing, oilset tongues.
A pot-valiant knight lumbers in next,
Flushed with fermented dreamfruit.
His breastplate clangs with jentacular remnants,
Eggs boiled in the sweat of fevered gods.
He laughs,
Cachinnates,
Then stabs a slab of unknown flesh
That redames his gluttony beneath his fork.
The acersecomic child sits on a high-backed chair of cartilage.
Hair snakes down in thick, choking ropes.
Her eyes,
Opsimath orbs of late-bloomed wisdom,
recogitate every movement.
She watches the meat breathe.
She watches the meat think.
Then comes the agathokakological thing,
Composed of hands and hooves,
Languor and lightning,
Its finger’s edges scripturient,
Full of mouths murmuring recipes.
The cacography of hunger scribbles across the walls:
Spells in spastic strokes,
Menus of mellow madness.
Patrizate demons echo chefs long devoured,
Cleavers swung with ancestral might.
Bêtise is no longer error,
but a course between the entrées.
It brings the centerpiece:
A solivagant abomination,
Glazed in black molasses,
Stuffed with a heart still beating,
Still dreaming of its noctivagant endeavors,
Through butchered hills,
Through spice-thick winds.
The air turns sweet with peccability.
One may sin,
But only if the dish requires it.
And now, you—
Yes, you—
Are the final course.
Do you not feel it?
The sauce congealing on your spine?
The fork tonguing your thoughts?
Come, dear guest.
Join the feast.
It has been waiting,
Since the first hunger
Swallowed a scream.
Τριχώδης Αλβεάριος 