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I am sat at my GP’s office,
undergoing a medical exam and the news
is not the kind I want.
I am protesting “Please doctor!”
“No. This is not something to ignore.”

He wants me to drastically alter my diet
and it is like watching the sky fall out
of the bottom of my world.
The spectre of that joyous morning gone.

Maybe I can turn him around, negotiate,
“I will do all the exercise in the world”
“Is not enough,” he interrupts forcefully,
and looking quite fed up.

“I am not giving you some alternate plan,
some way to avoid what your body needs.
No doctor in their right mind
would give a patient a licence to kill themself
just because they did not want to give up meat!”

Is meat really worth all this? My feeble denial
of the truth that someone with degrees
in the medics knows more about my frame
than I is pathetic.

“I can still eat meat as a little treat,
I will die another day, I will live forever,”
my appetite tries to convince my willpower.

Forever? No, no.
I am a squishy human of flesh and cool bones.
I will never be forever,
only diamonds are forever.