Jim Henson came up with a blue fuzzy character,
one who gobbled cookies, growled “Me want cookie!”,
“Me eat cookie!”, and “Om nom nom nom.”
The Muppets may first have put googly eyes
with the voracious appetite but generations
before have shared the trait of eating not just
a food of choice – quite often cookies or other sugary treats —
but anything and everything, including danishes, donuts,
lettuce, apples, bananas, as well as normally inedible objects.
Who knows who the first ancestor might have been
to carve out that set of traits. Could it be soon after the Garden
and that original sin issue the second was gluttony, cravings,
eating everything but the tree of knowledge? Of maybe
chewing on the bark from that…
The creator of cookie monsters was not Jim Henson.
Cookies and apple fritters and Blizzards and Blasts,
bread pudding and rum cake and date nut pies…
these things create cookie monsters. They made one of me.
But the most fun thing I can tell you? I’ve sat here,
writing this poem, Googling trying to figure out
the name of the cake I thought best. I can’t remember,
can’t find it. And I’m not a cookie monster today.