The body keeps a ledger of what’s owed and what it gets,
it doesn’t dwell on longing but it tallies up the debts.
When the credit runs to zero and the columns won’t align,
the body starts to renegotiate along a different line.
What the body knows when it has nothing is a cold and working truth,
not the kind they teach you in the classroom in your youth.
It knows how long the liver lasts, it knows which parts to spend,
it knows the weight of nothing like it’s always known the end.
The stomach folds in on itself and stops its usual sound,
the first three days the hunger screams and then it settles down.
By day five there’s a clarity that borders on the bright,
the body borrowing against tomorrow just to get through tonight.
The fat cells are the first to go, the body knows their worth,
it strips them layer after layer back toward leaner earth.
Then the proteins in the muscles get the call to reconvert,
the body eating its own engineering doesn’t hurt,
at least not in the way you’d think, it’s more a slow erasure,
a shrinking of the self down past the margin, past the measure.
The eyes grow large, the belly swells with nothing filling now,
the children look like photographs and not like children, how
you learn to read the stages like a doctor reads a chart,
the body speaking plainly through the language of its art.
What the body knows when it has nothing is that life insists,
it holds the line in strange ways, and it fights, and it persists.
And when it finally surrenders all the fighting and the keeping,
it goes so quietly that those left watching take it for sleeping.