I've Said This Before, in a Kinder Sense

My head aches, my joints linger over a sharp edge inside the bone.

I cannot push myself into healing, which is their destruction.

Can I sing the bacteria out?

Plants. I see them as plants with long vines, curling themselves against my insides.

Within me, worlds. I have said this before, but in a kinder sense. Worlds imagined and swirling, in visions, notes, words. Aren’t they also there? So curl round in me.

How many times have I tried to write and nothing happens. Nothing but the desert outside the window. Not in the way I’d love you, not in a quiet hour, stretching toward something that does not have wings.

Words need stillness. Not to be pushed forward, gathered.

But like the hours before a train arrives, how I shake with anticipation. Tearing a little something from my notebook.

What of bareness. So my mind has nothing. No thing to celebrate or approach or kiss.

I want a vision. I want a vision like a charge. Taped each morning, I want a letter. Or your picture.

So nothing fades.

In sickness, taped against the lung. Something has slipped away. The outline of a skirt. An idea.

Don’t words need stillness?

Stillness. The gift.

As though I thought I owned my bones anyway.

Are my words mine? Or something passing through? As though, out of the window, other things are searching other bodies.

And when I sit very still, perhaps the words will once again curl up next to me, reside by my ear, land on my nose. Not that I’d know. But the point is that they are yours.

Stillness—

Not how I’d love you, how I should.