That morning light from two large uncurtained windows
      doesn’t correct. 
My sleepy eyes. They stay small, stupid and grumpy. 
That nonetheless the rest of me moves. 
That it’s accident, but the light and I touch my desk at the same
      time. 
That the light doesn’t have hands. It seems like it should. It draws
      shapes the way hands do. 

That I’m not dreaming, because in dreams I can never
talk, and today my mouth is so dry I try infant sounds for
      elemental needs: wah for water, et cetera. 

That my fingers miss the keys. 

That suffering is often speechless, sometimes soundless, and yet
      we understand it exists in the absence, too. 
And yet have I ever not been shocked at pain? Like a toddler
      falling down. 

That there’s no elegy for the ongoing. 
When elegy travels from lament to solace, to return us from grief
      to life, to strip us from the dead. 

Not yet. Not yet. 
To honor suffering when honor puts gravestones where no body is,
      hides bodies where no gravestones are. 

Well, I can’t. 

That I used to speak as a whole being without doubt. Or do I
      misremember. 
I tend to brighten the past, shadow the present—which is
      shadowed, don’t mistake. 

That I am angry though powerless, like a child. 

Well then today I am a child. 
And with a child’s voice deepened by some form of progress,
      I ask for water. 
The same cadence, the same intonations—insistent and afraid
because all lack in childhood feels forever: a fever thirst, a mother
leaving for her job at the grocery store, a door locked to keep you
      safe. 
Small fists against the cold door. 

That they didn’t break it down, that they bled, that they hurt only
      later and now, not in a dream but in silence,
a pain like light against a wall, or just against.