Lonely in the Middle of It All

"You mentioned you just put on a little weight lately. Do you think this has anything to do with your patient?"
"I don't know. I don't know what you mean."
"O.K. Just -- watch your intake of sugar -- and sugar substitutes."
--from The Sopranos, Episode 5, second season

Spare us the look of indignation, the useless denial:
if it fits, wear it. We understand all too well the episodic
lapses and blackouts, the sorry jag after the glut:

Giddy, you tweak your silent confederates,
pleasers all, fanning indecently around you,
an array of consenting comfort, a lineup of easy virtue
too embarrassing to admit you know at all,
much less intimately (Again? says the cashier's unblinking
eye); as if an After Eight will really take you by your hand
and say, "There, there," patting it, the little griefs melting
into a prickly coolness on your tongue, mint after mint.
Or, nose up, you enter a fast food joint -- amygdala whipped
to a frenzy by grease teasing like an ancient musk --
ready to surrender, as if this really were a trysting place
from which to emerge sated, eyes blissful slits.
In love.

The body, elemental animal, can't keep a secret.

"I didn't mean to take it out on you!" you slur,
binge-sobbing with the remorse of an abuser
to your splitting head, who ignores you
in its sugar-spiked distraction, muttering to itself;
to your rioting taste buds, awash in sweets, sours
and savories, beyond your any hope of being reined in,
by now having developed a bloodlust for plunder
and pillage-bent on yet another garish foray;
to your bloated belly, stomach an amorphous sac
groaning acidic burps into a gleaning gut;
to your extremities, thigh chafing thigh in chagrin,
ridiculed by the aristocratic taper of the jeans,
puffy ankles and splayed feet sagging against each other
under a Dead Sea saltier than the great oceans.

The heart, in the middle of it all, pumps desperately,
racing glucose and lipid-laden platelets to stanch
the seepage where you are steadily leaching out.
Pumping desperately, leaching steadily. Pumping
desperately, leaching steadily.

-- P.Q. Perron