On Exhaustion

Words go first. The right ones bob at the end of the synaptic fishing line, dead weight. Grace goes, then nuance. I substitute “that” for a Mongol horde of nouns. I drop and retrieve my tenses. I lose my way in middle of a phrase. Meaning is a blow-up doll in the passenger seat of my brain.

I’m a week into summer camp. (Musicians cling to youth.) Only it is not camp at all, but a slow, sunny reaming. It ought to be complicated. There are people and music and ego and sweat in a glorious mush. Yet, there is nothing more for me to do than play, eat, sleep, repeat. I go where I’m told when I’m told. I steal food. I take the crackers and potato chips and bananas and the leftover pizza back to my bare white room where I sit in the sun and the wind and the white and think of nothing, that pocket of air under my tongue.