The Door to the Kitchen Is Locked Tonight (Tarrare)

Lyrics

[Verse 1]
Your throat is a cathedral no surgeon could map—
a passage that swallows what the mouth can't hold.
They watched you unhinge, synaptic plasticity
rewiring your swallow reflex into legend:
eels alive in your gullet, whole birds going down,
your esophagus stretched like a song that won't end.
The crowd held its breath; your body kept asking
what's next, what's possible, how wide can I go?

[Chorus]
You taught the body to rewrite itself,
nerve pathways firing in their own wild language.
Your hunger wasn't broken—it was *more*,
a reaching that made everyone else feel small.
You swallowed the world and stayed standing.

[Verse 2]
Long-term potentiation firing in your nucleus—
your stomach lining learned to hold what it shouldn't,
neuroplasticity etched in every cell's memory.
Your vagus nerve fired in patterns no textbook predicted,
interoception gone gorgeously wrong,
your own body a riddle you solved by living it.
No pain, no limit, just expansion and appetite,
proprioception rewritten with each impossible meal.

[Chorus]
You taught the body to rewrite itself,
nerve pathways firing in their own wild language.
Your hunger wasn't broken—it was *more*,
a reaching that made everyone else feel small.
You swallowed the world and stayed standing.

[Bridge]
Your throat singing its own neurology—
myelinated fibers carrying signals the body had never sent,
and you *grinned* through it, alive in your strangeness,
never apologizing for the space you took up,
the impossible thing you contained.

[Outro]
Your throat is still open in the watching,
still swallowing the air of every astonished face,
still teaching us what the body can become
when it stops asking permission.