The Hunger That Had No Floor (Tarrare)

Lyrics

[Verse 1]
Your throat opens like a cathedral door,
soft palate slack, epiglottis singing wide—
you swallow stones the size of plums whole,
and your esophagus learns what most will never know:
the body rewires itself when asked to hold the impossible.
Synaptic pathways firing in your medulla, your vagus nerve
conducting electricity through the dark of your gullet
like a musician learning a new instrument made of meat.

[Chorus]
You taught your body languages other bodies couldn't speak,
your throat a testament to what hunger taught your brain,
each swallow a small miracle of plasticity—
you were rewritten from the inside out,
and you wore that strangeness like a crown.

[Verse 2]
Your cortical remapping happened in darkness,
proprioceptive neurons mapping territories of your own stomach
that most will live a lifetime without naming.
Long-term potentiation carved new grooves in your motor cortex—
the repetition, the stretching, the accommodation of the enormous—
your brain's glial cells supporting each new synapse
as your throat became its own small country.
You didn't flinch. You kept opening.

[Chorus]
You taught your body languages other bodies couldn't speak,
your throat a testament to what hunger taught your brain,
each swallow a small miracle of plasticity—
you were rewritten from the inside out,
and you wore that strangeness like a crown.

[Bridge]
There's a word for what you did: *adaptation*.
Not survival. Not suffering. *Becoming*.
Your body didn't break—it *learned*.
Every fiber of your being singing yes
to the unbearable, the vast, the swallowed whole.

[Chorus]
You taught your body languages other bodies couldn't speak,
your throat a testament to what hunger taught your brain,
each swallow a small miracle of plasticity—
you were rewritten from the inside out,
and you wore that strangeness like a crown.

[Outro]
Your throat still open, still grinning,
still the widest door anyone ever walked through,
still teaching the body what it means to say yes.