My hands
began to lose hope
somewhere around two PM
on a Tuesday.
On Wednesday I looked
at what they were doing
on my guitar’s strings;
familiar songs,
songs I’d written,
did not sound the same.
I sit with them in my lap
often now: invalid limbs,
kin to my feet
that lately burn and prick
with the same disease.
They sob out loud
at times but mostly
fry in silence as we watch
the world itself
attempting suicide.
Hopeless, failed hands;
stinging, failed soles
of unsteady feet; heat and
drought everywhere and
a tingle within
that whispers both personal
and general doom.
When I tell my hands
there is no easy end to this,
that this is no longer
a crisis, but a state of being,
they flutter up from my lap
and then fall still.
It is hard for hands like these
to see all that demands to be done.
Hard for feet like these
to see how far there is to go.
As for me: in this body,
nothing is solid. Nothing
stops shaking. My hands
lose their grip. My feet fall out
from under me. I end up, daily,
staring up immobilized
from endangered ground,
ashamed that somehow,
I keep breathing.
