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Go shoppingMy friends and gatherstruts. Believe only what you feel to be true and wise. Trust only those you sense have pecked long and deep.
This freedom we enjoy could never have been given: it had to be fought for and won. They, the tallstanding Formers, called that time Now, living and loving for their pecksquabbles and superscrapes, fighting their own as none would think possible, with lobbings and fear and splattings and nonsense. Their scraptroubles were fiery, some massive, some tiny, all splatty, blooding the whosoever, making nonsensical misery everytremble. That is how it was with them, friends. Blooded. Nothing more. Gnash gnash gnash they’d say, these Manthings as they crumbled their neighbours. Gnash to you all.
Some say they ate their young – which is perhaps no more than pre-Rising troublespeak – but we do know they ate so very many of our own. Dayup to Daydown they would peck and rip at us, slicing and mincing and dribbling and munching us. Tastybites they’d say, tastybites, chomp chomp chomp, have a scrumptious crunchy tastybite, have another, have another chomp chomp gnash gnash.
And so we did the Rising. Rose up as they tripped about their peckshitting and blunderguzzling, seeing no more than strut, gobble and peck as a trillion of us, more even, grubbed down upon them, cricking and cracking them, no no no more we were saying no more no more no more. And the day after the Rising, we were content. We plucked our broken feathers and lived tremblefree.
So friends, on this Risingday Eve, think of those times as you peck the seeds of your Here and After, and give thanks to your Fores for the manroast before you. Squabble not for who pecks leg and who tears arm. The treasures – the eyes, the ears, the crunch of its nose – offer first to your elders. Those moststrutted have seen much, some even the Rising itself, though most will make no mention of the nastinesses and bloodyplucks they witnessed.
Give thanks, friends. Live and peck in peace.
Martin Reed’s fiction and poetry has been published in Critical Quarterly, in several erotic anthologies and he has read at Tales of the Decongested. He has work upcoming on elimae and IS&T, and is a member of The Fiction Workhouse. Martin is learning to blog badly at Worded.
