Hunger

A Poem

Photo by Randy Tarampi on Unsplash

I haven’t been eating much lately.
After years of unconsciously consuming everything on my plate,
I am trying to take my time,
Slowing down the chewing
And timing it with the beat of my heart.

Have you ever considered upon waking:
Is this hunger I feel—
Or habit?
Am I bored
Or is it time to eat?
You can always wait a while to see.

Until you go days without eating
Pushing yourself beyond limits of urge and indulgence,
You have no idea
what you are capable of.

It’s like holding your breath:
At first you can bear only seconds
before needing to gasp.
But then
with practice
seconds turn to minutes
And there is a day when you soon wonder
What you ever needed lungs
for.
In that moment of ecstasy
without oxygen
You feel something greater than instinct,
Which is when you learn to breathe
for the first time.

I am good at suffering,
I told a woman I would soon come to love,
And that told her everything she would ever need to know
about loving
me.

Hunger is good discipline,
Hemingway wrote,
And it’s true for living
As well as writing.
You don’t know what you can do
Until you see
what you can do
Without.

Lacking a steady supply of food and air,
Your other senses come alive
And you see that what you are made of
Is star-stuff.
Realizing your own durability,
You begin to interact with something beyond the borders of your body,
Catching a glimpse of a familiar firmament
dividing seen from unseen—
a whole horizon of revelation—
Testing the matter you thought you were made of.

There is something that burns in the heat of every fire
more than elements
or molecules
interacting with each other.
You are that
which transcends
Any package of hormones
Or programmed responses from childhood.

You are not lunch or dinner
Anymore than you are this breath
Or that.
And as you hold these chemicals
Inside the container of creation,
You may find yourself approaching something like the sun,
Which cannot consume
But will, indeed, test a person’s resolve,
Burning away what is not and
Welcoming you home.

This morning
I awoke without hunger,
Drank two cups of coffee,
And read for a while.
The stereo blared in the background,
And I began my day,
catching up on email and other correspondences.
“When are you going to write something of your own?”
a friend texted as my wife returned from the gym.

Now, I take a break
to begin building the first meal
of the day:

In assembling the food—
rice with curry and unpeeled shrimp,
fresh cilantro chopped and spread
over soupy mass with pinched lime
on top—
it occurs to me I am making enough
for two.

I feel a gurgle in a belly that must be mine,
A reminder of what it means to be alive
And in need.

We eat the curry
and clean the table
And I go back to work.

Not an hour later, the feeling returns.
I head out to cut the grass.
Before leaving,
I pick up the phone
and reply to my friend:
“Soon.”

I am starting to get my hunger back.