To You, About This

I woke up a cello

today; breathing heavy

chords into my

cloistered room; feeling

reverberations

through my awkward

wooden body.

Pausing

/

to rest

from an exhausting

kind of movement, a

tremor, you

wash into my thoughts

from recurrent

and flitting streams. Here,

I could tell you, talk

to you, about this, how

this feels, not this body, but

this as in found despair

for language, for

rhythm. And this, as in

my, incarnation, dusty with

dry resin, lies prostrate.

All I know is that cracked

and jaundiced ceiling, the rasp and tenor

of my voice, and a layer of the past

that is peeling

off of the walls.

/

Straining, I can hear you

hunched over the bathroom

sink proclaiming

that, sometimes, there’s no trusting

how you feel or,

at the very least,

the reasons you’re given.

~~~

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