Skinny Fat
A skinny person once fat is still prey to the fat that waits out every run, every breathless try again, or a bike at the drugstore a moment, whoever it is ducking inside for something not really crucial. None of it’s crucial as this is crucial: keeping the bulky bloated animal at a distance, howbeit an albatross distance but not like the guy in Coleridge’s opium-lovely rant who couldn’t, stopping to tell and tell and nearly choke with his story that poor wedding guest who just wanted to get to the party and eat himself senseless. Truth = the fable of truth. One sits in the body. One stands in it. How peculiar. And some call that skinny thing soul. But what if the fat thing, that wanting, is soul. And there’s no final size to it, not even a voice but when you sleep a noise lightly or loudly rhythmic you can’t hear, a nothing wired to a sea-bottom dark or in the earth’s deepest down where I’m told there is only a burning, as fat is said to burn slowly, never enough of it and never going out.
