if I am a keeper of memory, my body a vessel of lingerings

All this ache shattering my tendons, my focus. 

The sound of morning blurs me. My legs house the conundrum of pain, a night’s depletion of dreams. 

I watch the swallows breakfast through the window, wish myself their wings. 

I want their — .       Words escape me in the brain’s weather: clouds roll in to play a restless algebra. 

Platelets dithering, I scrape my muscles to remind my blood it is a migratory creature, too. 

There are days I cannot move. Enervated, I pray for vigor. 

I beg the sun to burn inside me, patch me up with hale spirit, a soundness of cells, mended. 

A conflicted world in my veins, I field the accusations of sloth from this horizontal plane. 

Nobody sees the ventricular battle, B leukocytes wielding swords. 

The birds, I watch, I want their —. What is the word? Something like sky hunger. 

Aphasic episodes obscure language, but it is not amnesia, not a forgetting. 

It is a fog over the map, a forcing of alternate routes. I want I want I want I want. 

I feel it but I have no word. Only a gesture of bird lifted by wind. Is all desire a circumlocution? 

If I am a keeper of memory, my body is a vessel of lingerings, a theatre of catastrophe. 

All war is a kind of occupation, a haunting. 

There is not a generation of us that has not seen its threats & piles of ravaged flesh.

Afflicted & conflicted. 

With every cytokine storm, my body re-gathers, re-collects. 

I am a synaptic conveyance of history reclined. 

The birds, I watch, I want their —.       What is the word? What is the word? Not flood. Not float. 

Something proximate & moved by seasons. In the grief cloud of my befores, I can’t seem to find it.

Something like a gathering of resiliences.          What is the word? What is the word? 

I know it rhymes with night.   

I am I am I am I am          Bird. Wing. An aerodynamic & avian thirst.