You ask how long a man can starve
before his ribs spell out the answer—
each bone a variable,
each hollow a parenthesis
waiting to be filled.
The body is a ledger:
subtract the bread,
carry the weight of absence,
divide the last sip of water
by the number of children
who still say father with their eyes.
At night, the stomach writes its proofs
in acids and silence—
Let x be the days without,
let y be the lie of fullness,
solve for z: the point at which
the soul stops borrowing light.
But the hands refuse the theorem.
They dig,
they knead the dirt into a language
even hunger cannot translate—
small fists planting seeds
where numbers fail.
And when the rain comes,
it does not ask for decimals.
It counts in green,
in tendrils that climb the air
like unbroken equations,
whispering:
The sum of all suffering
is still less than one stubborn root.
Mar 30
Mar 30, 2026 at 7:29 AM UTC
You ask how long a man can starve
before his ribs spell out the answer—
each bone a variable,
each hollow a parenthesis
waiting to be filled.
The body is a ledger:
subtract the bread,
carry the weight of absence,
divide the last sip of water
by the number of children
who still say father with their eyes.
At night, the stomach writes its proofs
in acids and silence—
Let x be the days without,
let y be the lie of fullness,
solve for z: the point at which
the soul stops borrowing light.
But the hands refuse the theorem.
They dig,
they knead the dirt into a language
even hunger cannot translate—
small fists planting seeds
where numbers fail.
And when the rain comes,
it does not ask for decimals.
It counts in green,
in tendrils that climb the air
like unbroken equations,
whispering:
The sum of all suffering
is still less than one stubborn root.
(A fusion of resilience and erosion—30 lines, free verse, where struggle becomes a solvable equation.)
