The Emaciation of Life

It shows up grinding in an instant, in a century.
Instinct and desire.
A hunger.

It’s not in the gut.
Lower than that.

It doesn’t have a name.
It lives in the blood and the cells
of every human being.

A kind of rumbling noise in the chest,
like a record left playing in a basement—
John Coltrane, or Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue,
faintly echoing through the halls of the mind.

This thing, this longing,
won’t be satisfied by food, savory or sweet.

It needs grit—
something to come back
and mean it this time.

Even the body knows
it runs toward things
that vanish on the horizon,
that don’t want to be caught.

You start confusing appetite with memory,
and the lines get blurred,
and the mind fucks itself,
and the soul feeds on scraps of trash,
trying to satisfy that twisting knot.

The brain replays
the bedroom scene of ecstasy—
2 a.m., sweat-soaked,
half lost in it, half gone already,
only to wake up
broken, busted, confused.

And at some point,
you stop calling it hunger.

You just settle in—
like a mouse with crumbs on its face—
to the rotten slice of life.