ABOUT THE POEM: Chapter 110 is the manifesto of a man who has reclaimed his name by stripping away everything else. It bridges the gap between the public persona of "Ronie"-the strong, successful boxer-like figure-and the private reality of a son who spent fifteen years in a chair to repay the shame of an incomplete degree. This chapter is the "Anti-Thesis" of the modern transactional world; it is a rejection of the idea that money can fill the hole left by a twenty-seven-year starvation for love. The narrative follows the "rusting" of a character that was built too rigid to bend. After losing his mother and nursing his father through multiple crises, the narrator briefly collapses into the illusion of paid affection and alcohol. However, his time in rehab serves as a purification. He realizes that if he couldn't accept a relationship without a "name" from someone he loved (Frooti), he certainly cannot accept a transaction from a stranger. By the end, Ronie Dinosaur accepts his total isolation. He stops trying to buy a seat at the table and instead chooses to walk his own path, hungry but upright. It is a story of a man who has realized that his greatest strength isn't his money or his muscles, but his refusal to kneel to the world's cheap substitutes for love.Ronie Dinosaur Chapter 110 – Die Hungry Rather Than Kneel
I was starving for affection-
simple human touch,
not just flesh-
when I considered paying a woman for sex.
It was the morning after my father’s heart attack,
when no one was left to listen.
They sell only what they sell.
Nothing more.
The story begins earlier.
Love at first sight in school.
Rejected the same afternoon.
By night, I was dead inside.
To erase the public humiliation
she delivered in front of the entire class,
I spent the gap years forging a body so strong
no one could ever treat me like that again.
When I finally reached college,
people saw the power at once
and named me Ronie-
after a local boxer.
I fell for my best friend.
She melted in my arms;
I wanted all of her.
We fought because she refused
to call me her boyfriend.
I came home without a degree.
I don’t blame her alone,
but she was part of the reason.
Years later, at the bus stop,
she asked loudly,
“Why don’t you talk to me?”
I said nothing.
She was graduating,
already placed through campus recruitment.
I had chosen a different path.
For seven years I worked like a machine-
thirty-six-hour shifts online,
eight hours of sleep-
until the money made me a millionaire.
One day, curious,
I opened her Facebook.
Her surname had changed.
My parents never looked for a bride,
even though I earned well-
comfortably, every month.
Loneliness pushed me into an online relationship.
I was always online,
but only for work.
She played me for fun.
Two years wasted.
Then my mother died.
I cried again.
I took a stand for the house, for my father.
Gym and back-
no detours, no special diet,
only whatever the shop sold on the way home.
Corona arrived.
I didn’t flinch.
Then my father’s heart attack again.
I have spent fifteen years sitting on a chair at home
to earn money,
to give back what my parents had demanded
from their son who went to an engineering college
and returned empty-handed.
That’s when the iron character finally rusted-
the same character that, by thirty-seven,
had left me without a single girlfriend.
I nursed my father through two bouts of corona
while a paid woman pretended affection for cash,
and I-fool-believed it for a moment
and drank until I fell flat one day.
They sent me to rehab
without asking why.
Now, clean, I see clearly:
if I refused Frooti’s advances without a name,
how could I buy a stranger now?
She was my friend.
We deserved more
than a transaction of pleasure.
So Ronie Dinosaur decides:
I will not insult myself
by paying for flesh from now on.
If you still don’t see the difference,
you never will.
I have no one.
None at all.
I let go-
even of the desire
that money can arrange.
I would rather die hungry
than kneel.
I have been starving for love
for twenty-seven years now,
since the day I saw the girl at school.
I am Ronie Dinosaur.
I walk.
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