Since I’m in constant pain, and laying in bed, immobile, with a horrible screen as companion, falling in and out of sleep, confusing where I live with where I was born, the news, as dark as it ever was but now with global attached to every tragedy, I mistook the throbbing in my shoulder for a rhythm of jazz, and the white men with round faces for rats running up and down my arm promising trade among nerve, muscle and bone, dollars exchanged in every little capillary to purchase opium, or opioids laced with flecks of fentanyl, just one shy of overdose, for big keys are needed to open big locks. Or little ones, I forget.  My thoughts are mush. Only if I could be spirit.  Only if I could make a deal for youth.  Years for minutes of calm, a single pane window over a close and green meadow for the 4K LCD screen full of lilting heads in offices lit by decisions affecting not so innocent children who are not in my ancient clan, not with same colour of eye or inflection of words.  I shouldn’t judge in my state.  Except to say that more stuff doesn’t necessarily trump resilience.  If it’s one rule we can decipher in fossils is that big things die off first when the going gets tough.  We’re all pretty tall, comparatively.

jam19