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Risen
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There's an Alanis Morissette song called "Bent 4 U". It's very me, it's very us.
There's a line in - "feast on scraps" - which gives the album its name. It's an excellent album. It includes "Hands_Clean", which is another of my favourite us songs.
It isn't just stomachs which can be starved. A heart can be starved too. I fed on the scraps thrown from your table. The parts of you no one else wanted. I took kind words when you felt like giving them, and I did not beg when I went hungry at night. I made a feast of the scraps, the cut-offs, the offal and half-chewed bones. The occasional delicious morsel wrapped in words. They were beautiful and filling because they came from you, and I ignored the hunger pangs.
It was too hard to cut off all at once. You couldn't just stop. So there was instead a gradual tapering off. The scraps came less often. The food was rotten, the scraps more meagre than ever. Eventually I turned away and began to look for other tables.
Tables at which I would be seated at a lady's right hand, and offered choice cuts. As much as I could eat. My stomach rumbled. I turned my head back, bowed it, knelt at your feet and begged for more.
Like a dog, I was kicked away from the table, and laughed at. You threw a bone in the direction of another table, and gave me a blessing before eating, a grace, to say to whomever I sat beside next.
I will no longer feast on scraps. I am done. I will wash my hands clean in a finger bowl scented with lemons.
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140430
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