The Hunger That Had No Floor (Tarrare)

Lyrics

[Verse 1]
You were thin — that's the part nobody expects —
thin and sweating and always warm to the touch
as if something inside you ran hotter
than the furnace was designed for
Your parents put you out at seventeen
because the groceries could not survive you
and you walked to Paris
eating everything the road offered:
offal, cork, the stones in unpicked fruit,
the rind, the stem, the part
that is not the food
but is near enough to the food
that your body could not tell the difference

[Verse 2]
You performed on the streets —
ate baskets of apples in a sitting,
a live cat in front of a crowd
that paid to watch a man
do the thing they were most afraid of:
want without limit, need without a switch,
the hypothalamus turned up to a frequency
that doesn't appear on any clinical chart
They paid because watching you
made their own appetites feel polite
You gave them permission to be moderate
by being the far wall of excess

[Chorus]
The French army found a use for you —
swallow this document, walk behind enemy lines,
pass it through and deliver the intelligence
They fed you thirty pounds of bull liver
as a rehearsal
and you ate it in a single session
and asked what else there was
The generals couldn't look at you
but they could use you
which is the oldest arrangement
between a body like yours
and every institution
that has ever had one

[Verse 3]
The spy mission failed —
the Prussians caught you, beat you,
opened you up on suspicion of smuggling
and found only the document,
which had survived your entire digestive system
still legible, still folded,
which means your body
was the most secure courier
the French republic ever employed
and also the loneliest —
a man whose insides
were examined by enemies
looking for the same thing his doctors looked for:
an explanation that never arrived

[Bridge]
You begged Dr. Percy to make it stop —
you told him you would take any surgery,
any cure, any compound
that would make the wanting quiet
He tried vinegar, tobacco pills,
laudanum, soft-boiled eggs
and none of them found the bottom
because there was no bottom —
the signal from your gut to your brainstem
was a siren with no off position
and you lived inside that siren
every waking minute of your life
while the crowds applauded the spectacle
of a man who could not stop screaming
in a frequency only his stomach could hear

[Outro]
You died at twenty-six
and the autopsy found organs
no textbook had a name for —
a gullet you could see down from the jaw,
a stomach that filled the abdomen like a sail,
a body that had remodeled itself
around the hunger
the way a tree grows around a fence post:
not because it chose to
but because growing is what a body does
when stopping is not an option it was offered
The drawer where they keep your name
smells like ammonia and sulfur
and nobody wants to open it
but everyone looks