When hunger bites, we eat the days, ravenous as ravens ripping into roadkill. We season them with slapdash similes, like salty seasonal labourers peppering their daily slog with spicy semi-truths, then we wolf them down in greasy chunks without savouring anything but a sickly aftertaste. We give thanks to the god of squandered time with gaseous prayers laced with passive aggression that passes for passion in the absence of temporal context, when all we mean is: Please sir, I want some more. But there is no more, and the days are the rib-thin cattle of Pharaoh’s prophetic dream, with that time of fat and plenty nothing more than unreliable memory. We’re still hungry, and we’d eat our children’s shadows if we could peel them off the parched earth. And when even figurative language has gone, we’ll eat our own tongues, then starve in silence.
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Oz Hardwick
Picture Nick Victor