I’ve been hungry many times,
but what I’m talking about now
was in New York City,
night was falling,
and I stood in front of
the glass window of
a restaurant.
In that window
was a roasted pig,
eyeless,
with an apple in its mouth.
A damned, forsaken pig.
I, damned and forsaken too.
Beyond the pig,
inside,
people
sat at tables,
talking, eating, drinking.
I was not one of those people.
I felt a kinship with the pig.
We’d both been placed in the wrong
place
at the wrong
time.
I imagined myself in the window,
eyeless, roasted, with an apple in my
mouth.
That would draw a crowd.
“Hey, he’s got no rear at all!”
“His hands are way too bony!”
“You can see his ribs!”
I left the window,
headed to my room.
I still had a room.
As I walked to my room,
I started to wonder:
could I eat some paper?
Some newspapers?
Cockroaches?
Maybe I could catch a rat?
A live rat.
Skin it,
gut it,
remove the eyes.
Scrape a bit off the head, the tail.
No, I’d die of some horrible rat disease!
I kept walking.
I was so hungry everything seemed
edible:
people, fire hydrants, asphalt,
wristwatches…
my belt, my shirt.
I entered the building
and climbed the stairs to my
room.
I sat in the chair.
Didn’t turn on the light.
I just sat there wondering if I was
crazy
because I wasn’t doing anything
to help myself.
Then the hunger passed,
and I just sat there.
And then I heard it:
two people in the next room,
copulating,
I could hear the springs of the bed
and the moans.
I got up, left my
room, and returned to
the street.
But this time, I walked in a different
direction,
away from the pig
in the window.
But I thought of the pig
and decided I’d rather die
than eat that
pig.
It had started to rain.
I looked up,
opened my mouth, and let a few drops
fall in… soup from the sky…
“Hey, look at that guy!”
I heard someone say.
Fools, I thought,
stupid fools!
I closed my mouth and kept
walking.
