My heart has been dragged into my feet,
I think,
Where it pumps blood, horribly, towards my chest.

Sometimes I can feel the lump near my ankle,
And it hurts,
Almost always, when I walk around the house with it.

I tried to pull it back up in me with deep breaths.
I thought
If I breathed out enough air, my heart would fill the empty space.

But my lungs, now, just search for both air and blood,
It seems.
They’re always quiet, these days, like the earth after snow.

Only one day did I feel my heart pounding in my head.
I felt it
But its pumping simply bludgeoned what was left of my brain.

Every now and then I try that miraculous thing called thinking
when––or so they tell me––you speak inside your head:
elegant monologues and soliloquies addressed
in collections of pictures and words and emotions,
always somehow more eloquent in the mind than in the world.
When I try, however, my head seems unable to pace,
unable to merely look down with brow narrowed in thought
and hands clasped behind the back or perhaps resting on the chin
as everyone else seems capable, as everyone tells me is possible.

Instead, when every now and then I try that miraculous thing called
thinking, my thoughts choose to flitter like hummingbirds
before my eyes, through my ears, out of my mouth,
running between the cloth of my clothes
or often flowering out of my shoe where––it seems––
they’ve built a nest, with eggs resting, warmed
by the heat of my foot. I try that miraculous thing
called thinking and the eggs perched at my heel
start to crack, and I spend the rest of my hours listening
as the little hummingbirds inside peck at
the shells of their eggs. And then I return to trying that miraculous
thing called thinking and they all somehow
crack open the thin shell and start biting at my shoulders,
picking away my hair, grabbing at my eyes,
clawing for my mouth and pecking at my head
as though it was just another shell with more hummingbirds inside
if I could only get it open and achieve that
miraculous thing called thinking.

That sad moment
When your fingers can’t type acros the keybboard.  
Because itall runs together like something
From another time whe nthings were less
Than they are now. It’ s always easier, you know,
With less. Always easier when hnds run smoothly
Over the snow or the leaes or the sun
Because they arent shaking quite like they are
Now. Now, with more thought, more feared, more lost
To the losing of days that always leave, evntually.
More to keep you up at night as your hands
Shake but tryto type throug it anyway. More
To keeep you distracted from yourself
But also more to kee pyou all too concentrated
On the world, thatthing that makes you rhands shake,
Tha thng thatis always more thn you want itto be.

The sparrow was caught in our freezer in a blackout;
poor thing. I could hear it beating its wings,
calling to us, wanting to be let out.
But the sparrow was in the freezer during a blackout,
when the power had failed, the freezer stopped freezing
and if we had only opened its doors,
let the poor thing fly away––
why, our food may have melted.
The ice cream would have dripped from its box,
the peas would have defrosted on the counter,
the frozen fruit would have been only fruit:
raspberries, strawberries, blueberries, rhubarb.
If we had let the sparrow out, it would have let the cold out with it;
we’d have lost our food, all that we had tried to preserve.
All that was necessary for life: it was in those freezer foods.
Of course, the sparrow kept calling, wanting.
But we didn’t really have a choice;
we would have died. Maybe.
Sometimes, at least, it feels like that’s all there is:
food, frozen in the freezer
and a sparrow.