SO BITE ME

So I'm faced with a dilemma;

It’s a red meat, quite fatty,
and extremely fragrant. After eating dog
beef seems tasteless. 

form an alliance

Meat from younger horses
is lighter in colour. People use it similar
to the way they use beef.

or find out what budgie tastes like.

Cat meat sells for $1.32 a pound.
Young cats are tender. The animals are raised 
the same way cows are.

I'll lick my bits and ponder on it.

THEY EAT HORSES, DON'T THEY?

or THE NEIGH-SAYERS
or MR. ED BURGERS
or HORSE SHIT 

for TC, SJ and JM-G

1. 

Horse meat is the culinary name for meat
cut from a horse. It is a major meat

in only a few countries, but it forms
a significant part of the culinary traditions

of others. It is slightly sweet, tender, low in fat
and high in protein. In the late Paleolithic era

wild horses formed an important source of food.
Horse meat was also eaten as part of Germanic

pagan religious ceremonies in northern Europe
particularly associated with the worship of Odin

2.

France dates its taste for horse meat
to the Revolution. Just as hairdressers and tailors

set themselves up to serve commoners, the horses
maintained by aristocracy as a sign of prestige

ended up alleviating the hunger of the lower classes.
It was during the Napoleonic campaigns

when the surgeon-in-chief of Napoleon's grand army,
Dominique-Jean Larrey, served horse as a soup.

In Aspern–Essling, cut from the supply lines,
the cavalry used the horses' breastplates  

as cooking pots and gunpowder as seasoning.
In 1866 the French government legalised horse meat.

3.

It is a taboo in some English speaking countries.
It is a taboo amongst the Romani people and in Brazil.

Horse meat is not generally eaten in Spain (except in the North)
Horse meat is forbidden by Jewish dietary laws.

In the past horse meat has been eaten by Persians, Turks, Hanafi and Tartars,
but it has never been eaten in the Maghreb.

Popes Gregory III and Zachary instructed Saint Boniface
to forbid the eating of horsemeat to those he converted.

Despite the Anglophone taboo, horse meat was eaten in Britain,
especially in Yorkshire, until the 1930's and in times of post-war shortage.

4.

Beef (63%), Onion (10%), 
Wheat Flour, Water, Beef Fat,
Soya Protein Isolate, Salt,
Onion Powder, Yeast, Sugar, Barley Malt Extract,
Garlic Powder, White Pepper Extract,
Celery Extract, Onion Extract. Horse.

MEAT JOY

for JM–G

Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls
— James Joyce

The gizzards of chickens
are suckled with frenzied
slurps and the bones
are marrowed by tongues
that probe the insides
for gelatinous globs of fat.

Teeth that bit femurs
and ribs and tibias
are gnawing on ulnas
and clavicles, stripping
the flesh from the scraps
to be tossed to the pigs.

Chewing on claws
for the knuckle-meat,
an ecstasy of gristle
and skin that sticks
in teeth like gum
and spills down chins.

MUSCLE

for AM

These are the smoked streaky back bacon men,
flesh pressed against oily cellophane skin,

sausages cooked to burst. Extra lean meat,
joints of beef, sweat on a low oven's heat,

tendons tightening then softening tender
under the striplights. Sheep hearts and liver,

all of the offal that fills out the back
and thighs. Cured, hung for months in a smoke-stack

or salted on hooks in a meat cellar.
Some say the swelling is saline, water

injected under the rinds, ninety-six
percent nothing but oatmeal and sawdust.

CHOOKS REVISITED

but he had never expected to live to see 

one hog dressed by several hundred men.

It was like a wonderful poem to him 

and he took it all in guilelessly. — Upton Sinclair

I was immune to the smells. The flesh that came

to me down the line, hand over fist under cleaver,

grew less tender to touch. The meat, hard

in my palms, was difficult to love. I broke bones

down the backs of beasts like breadsticks, snapped

chook necks with my brothers like sharing wives.

We do all that here, under one roof, with knives.

I stopped feeling guilty, was no longer disgusted

by the cannibalised corpses we swapped. The chooks

stripped clean to the bone, minced or diced,

thinning down to the end of their lives 

like the cigars we smoked. We were a machine making death.

I worked overtime, eyes down on the belts, obsessing

over skins, removing the sinews that cooked tough. 

With each chook, I performed automatic routines 

with my fingers and never came up for breath.

CHOOK

The slaughterhouse set my head pounding:

all those chooks jostling along the disassembly lines.

All the men there who shake hands with corpses.

All the codeine lighting. All the flesh.

I'd never though flesh was grotesque 'til I went there,

'til I saw what men do to chooks with knives.

Yet there was something arousing about it -

The chook chook of the machines? The conveyor belt?

Perhaps. I'd rather it was the men, elbow deep

in chook meat, groping wet innards,

packaging them. The fact they do all that here

under one roof. None go home. None have wives.

I think I began to like the smell of men and meat;

the mechanical nature of work and lines.

I began to want to be a chook, paralysed by light,

manhandled on the belts - torn - reformed - repackaged all night.