My history with food is such
that too many people will say,
“We have this leftover steak here.
Jon! Come over and eat this leftover steak!”

And I like free food
and I hate things going to waste
and I don’t want to reject somebody who thought of me
for something special
like eating steak
so odds are, I’m going to eat that steak,
even if I’m not very hungry.

If I’m really not hungry,
or the steak is too rare,
maybe I’ll say
“Let me eat this later,”
and then maybe I can pass it off
to some homeless person I meet
or actually eat it later myself
when it’s less likely the steak will make me sick.

The point is,
my reputation leaves me
a prisoner of former food habits
that I sometimes forget to be ashamed of.

I just ate the body of leftover Valentine’s Day chocolate
because it was provided to me
and I couldn’t find a way out of receiving it
and then couldn’t find a way out
of resisting it.

There are certainly healthier ways
of dealing with this.

Perhaps they’ll come to me
later.