Covering the mirrors is what people do in a house of mourning, and «DIET» begins in a room that feels like one. The speaker has draped the mirrors in black scarfs, yet they still "stare me down." The poem never names a condition, but the title, the talk of weight and bones, and the closing question about eating suggest a mind caught in a punishing relationship with food and the body. That is an inference from the text, and the poem's power comes from how little it needs to say outright.
The first stanza sets up a ritual that cannot work. With the mirrors hidden, the speaker "can't see anything," but the "monster" is still there, "leaving its tears." The monster could be the reflection, an inner voice, or the illness itself, and the poem keeps it unclear. The speaker's response is odd and sad: she picks the tears up and puts them back again. It is a small, compulsive act that undoes itself, a loop with no progress. Then she "tiptoe[s]," "almost slipping," as if crossing ice or trying not to wake something. The stanza ends on a chiming pair, "out" and "doubt," so that leaving the room only leads "into my own doubt." Even the escape is a trap. The earlier "fear" and "tears" are a looser, near rhyme, which gives the opening a restless, unfinished sound.
The couplet that follows is the poem's quietest turn. "I wrap myself up in my blanket of comfort / i wrap myself up in my blanket of suffer." The repeated structure makes the two things interchangeable. Comfort and suffering are the same blanket, and the speaker cannot tell which she is holding. The grammar adds to the effect. "Suffer" is a verb where a noun belongs, and whether or not that is deliberate, it makes the word feel pressed into a shape it does not fit, like the speaker herself.
Next comes a chain of "what about when" questions: cold feet, wanting to sleep, dizziness. Each is a small physical complaint, and each is bigger than the last. "Cold feet" is also an idiom for hesitation, so the body and the nerves speak at once. The third question runs on without a pause and piles up sound: "my weight is weighing me down untill i drown and i break some bones." The echo of weight and weighing, and the slide from "down" to "drown," make the sentence feel like sinking. Then comes the most startling image: "i hear them crack." The speaker hears her own collapse. There is a bitter paradox here, because the heaviness she fears is also what seems to crush her. The weight is more a dread than a measurement.
The final lines are the poem's boldest structural choice. "do / i / eat / today?" is stretched down the page, one word per line. A question most people answer without thinking becomes a staircase taken one nervous step at a time. The lowercase "i" is a single letter standing alone on its own line, and the pause around it says a great deal about how small and exposed the speaker feels. The last line then answers with a strange logic: eating "only add[s] to the weight for the rest of my bones to break." The phrase "the rest" implies some bones have already broken. Her reasoning is turned inside out, and the reader can see the distortion even though the speaker cannot. Because the poem ends on a question mark, nothing is resolved. The decision hangs there as it would at the start of every day.
The poem does not rely on graphic detail or on a story with a cure at the end. It stays with the moment before the decision, where an ordinary action carries enormous fear. Its short, quiet title, in capitals and in guillemets, sounds almost clinical, which makes the private turmoil underneath feel even larger. The poem is credited only to lemonpastilles, and it needs nothing more than its own words. It shows how a mind can turn everyday life into a debate, and it lets us hear that debate from inside.