A skinny person once fat
is still prey to the fat that waits out
every run, every breathless
try again, or a bike
at the drugstore a moment, whoever it is
ducking inside for something not
 
really crucial. None of it’s crucial
as this is crucial: keeping the bulky bloated
animal at a distance, howbeit
an albatross distance but not like the guy
in Coleridge’s opium-lovely rant who
couldn’t, stopping to tell and tell and nearly
choke with his story that poor
wedding guest who just wanted to get to the party
and eat himself senseless.
Truth = the fable
of truth.
 
One sits in the body. One stands in it.
How peculiar. And some call that skinny thing
soul. But what if
the fat thing, that wanting,
is soul. And there’s no final size to it, not even
a voice but when you sleep
a noise lightly or loudly rhythmic you
can’t hear, a nothing
wired to a sea-bottom dark
or in the earth’s deepest down
where I’m told
 
there is only a burning, as fat is said
to burn slowly, never
enough of it and never going out.