I Woke Up A Cello

I woke up a cello
today, breathing heavy
chords into my
cloistered room, feeling
reverberations
through my awkward
wooden body.
Pausing
to rest from
an exhausting kind of

movement, a
tremor, you
wash into my thoughts
from recurrent and
flitting streams. Here,
I could tell you, talk
to you, about this, how
this feels, not this body, but
this as in a found

despair for language, for
rhythm. And this, as in
my, incarnation, dusty with dry
resin, prostrate in
these swollen chords. I
know that cracked and
jaundiced ceiling, the
rasp and tenor of my
voice. I can hear
you hunched over
the bathroom
sink proclaiming that,
sometimes, there's no
trusting how you
feel or, at the
very least, the reasons
you're given. But I
said that or I thought it
before, before

this. I've stayed calm for as
long as I could, felt
collected as far
down as my skin would
go, now this
shell, but under that
tossing as a feverish
sleep, muscle,
bone, and nerves shifting
hot and cold. My
voice gives me
away that tremble, now
tremolo, stitched to my
answer.