The taut rows in which they lie are not, alas, a mark of pride in work 
displayed by some fastidious fish processing professional, 

their neat arrangement is mere vacuum packing; it states the claim 
of furtive reason, entitlement to more and more and more which might

explain your own relationship to these morsels, these gutted capsules 
of flesh and pinbones softening to irrelevance, which so ably direct 

(or redirect) the biological imperative for certain 
minerals as hard to attain far from the sea as they are necessary 

for core cerebral functions, that’s why they caught your eye,
prone as they were, on the supermarket shelf, at that moment

you were no better than a mackerel or some other Scombridae,
to which nature has given a pathological appreciation for the colour silver,

silver, for it is the colour of skin, silver, for what lies beneath
the skin is life itself, another’s, which, once claimed, becomes your own.