look my tongue! feel my terrible eyes. I push my head under your hand. I am covered in fleas at your cocktail party.
I love the good men who live the strange den. The grasses pricked my calves as I walked. Beyond the swaying fields, I saw the great rocks rising like towers. It seemed some great worm had burrowed in and out of them, creating tunnels. I had the head of a dog. Strings of drool hung from my black lips- I was a savage thing, wasn't I? I looked in and saw the men.
How can it be that they baptized the animal? Is that not what I was? Rising from the water, I thought I saw the world differently. No longer a savage. But maybe I don't remember things as they really were. What was it really like in the kingdom? I remember it like you remember being an infant. No, what was it like?
How can this be? You crush the offspring of dholes under your feet, proclaiming mercy over their cries and yelps. Why feed only man, how you thought of men? These beasts look a world like us. They give their children toys and do nurse them, they feel man's sorrow to lower their fellows into the earth- but it cannot be! What terrible beasts yet. How strange and ugly they sing. What horrible teeth- we ourselves do not need such fangs, for we are quite adept at tearing flesh from flesh ourselves.
So I do not remember the past. And I think of the good men in their secret refuges. Fathers to me? Something else? Troubling to me that I cannot distinguish the smell of blood from incense. How do I read men's eyes?