And maybe you can’t know me now. Maybe I’m just blood. Whatever that’s for.

Alice Notley, Hemostatic

The misery of a week, now past, is rooted in pathologies of song. The sound of a piano along, a whistling melody, the wondrous tune of my discontent. A swift, sharp, movement of hands, left over right, an arpeggio along my skin. I knew better than to trust this. I knew better than to trust. And then, of course, not six hours later, a silence fell on me, spread through my half-healed lungs, until it hurt my jaws, my throat. I was nothing. Unanswered. Again. I scarcely feel the absence. I hardly feel a loss. Instead there is a vitriol here, a kind of writhing energy, a thinly swallowed wrath. I have done my penance, and then some. I have paid a thousand times for every scar. My mind collapsed beneath chemicals and steel; I learned the worth of listlessness; I made these fragments whole. I spent the autumn half-deafened by the miracle of my health. My efforts are at long last realized, if not complete. That has to count for something. Wake up, step through the front door. Keep your eyes down. Don't recognize what was, if it isn't anymore. Breathe softly. Speak less. Show them what you've always known. You have outlived worse. Falling out of love with a girl I knew so long ago, with eyes darker than starlight and a mind that once sheltered mine, then falling back into it, and out again, soft and sweet, a detuned radio. I'm not bitter. I'm just trying. An ancient city collapses around me, the mighty cathedrals crumble; the illusion is undone; the blank bones of concrete are exposed.