I feed my body less and want more        the surplus
I was promised          storehouses of grain        plains of locust
don’t signify a thing without hunger    
telos that defers its own ending

Which isn’t to say I’ve a vision

or can calculate a head of grain against a golden calf 
in a crisis or pinch or hitch in which a child           (there is always a child) 
born tomorrow judges me for my lack 
of discretion, brings legal action against my hunger, which wouldn’t have existed 
were it not for the child’s face always looming 
before me    asking me to materialize what won’t 

I stock my dreams like cans in a bunker     I wait
for doom    siphoning off a day here and there     I store the future
in a sack with a hole through which a mouse lives and dies happy
I eat its shit knowingly and with envy of its tiny gut

Which isn’t to say I’ve promised anything        

only that I’ve considered the balance         I weighed the future 
against my hunger and found it     wanting       found the surplus was only
my own body working twice as hard then harder    hardening itself 
against a future I had already consumed