If the people don’t feed me, I will simply cease to exist.

But they always feed me.

They give me their young.

I like the little girls best.

When the young are fresh, I serve merely as a distraction, a mass of meaningless images and sounds. But in a few short years, they begin to ripen, and the little girls begin to understand what I whisper to them. They sing my song, mimic my dance, wanting to be admired, to be told, above all else, that they are pretty.

They know how highly that is valued here. Their parents do not tell them otherwise.

By the time the girls have matured, they know the postmodern, pornographic words to their existence by heart, and my narcotics have taught them to be numb to any other ideology.

They don’t feel a thing when I unhinge my jaws, and swallow them whole.

If the people don’t feed me, I will simply cease to exist.

But they always feed me.