A small room behind a bay window. A single bed, a table and chair, and a sink. I could manage something larger, with more conveniences, but I could never match the view.

The cry I keep hearing -- it is no longer coming from outside my window but from within this room, from the closet to the right of my table so shallow I cannot hang my shirts and coats with their shoulders front to back, but side to side, a cry

that will soon enough come from inside me, and then what? new forms? these same words but as rungs that poem of those who, like the limbless crying out from battlefields, homebound, unable to rise from their beds, the war

inside us, raging, us against us? It is ... futile? ironic? shitty? given the historic emphasis on hard work, achievement, how important it is to set goals, how if we work hard enough we will achieve them -- over a ground that continues to shift, that never kept still, never neutral, always a battlefield, a script

whose final act is hidden? never written? To write like this, to write through this, to read back on that writing and revise? These are the thoughts I awake to, lucky enough to get out of bed with -- until one day the weight of them ...