electricity gives and electricity takes,
i think there has been a severance
between hand and mind,
a crack just wide enough for lost words to 
slip through 
like sand in an hourglass
of lost time i will never make up for.

my friends see it too
and relief is so quick 
to become grief when you realize 
that the loss is as real and gaping and vacant
as you feared it was.

as a child i took pride
in the way i could carry words
with me, own them
permanently
so that no one could take them away. 
i always imagined
i’d go to my grave with
words cradled in my arms,
threaded through my hair like wildflowers.

but memory gives and memory takes
what it is owed
and electricity comes with a price,
one that i am still paying.
some days 
my memories feel as slippery 
as the dreams i have at night 
that i can’t remember in the morning.

the lost words, 
they don’t belong to me anymore,
i cannot carry them in my head
the way i did for so long,
instead i write them down in a little book,
each page a graveyard.

i can only hold onto sounds now
not letters or meaning making,
no complexities,
just simple sounds, 
phonemes, allophones. 

i find i’ve written conviction 
instead of condition,
assign when i meant define, 
breeze instead of breathe,
because i can only hold onto sounds now,
echoes ringing in my ears.
i’m afraid that i will never live up to
the potential i once had.

electricity gives and electricity takes
eighteen little seizures
and sometimes my limbs still jerk
of their own accord,
as if they too are not mine anymore,
a side effect 
i was promised would be temporary. 

there are drawings in my sketchbook 
that i don’t remember drawing,
months and years of time and memory gone,
but out of everything i’ve lost
it’s the words i miss most.

they used to live 
in my ribcage
in my skull,
in the palm of my hand.
now they are just visitors, 
tourists, 
ghosts,
so fleeting
as if they never really belonged to me at all.