Every time they put me under
I wake with a little more dead in me than before.

Cold I sit on my April porch, golden ragworts
coming to a bulbous head
and press my thumb into freshly stitched scalpel-carved wounds
feeling
just beneath the skin
the new spindly, far-reaching
necrotic webbing knit
itself carefully amongst my tumor-festered own.
In unison we pulse,
my heartbeat bleeding life into one
that had lost it so long ago.

Patchwork of the dead,
all these new nerves remember
with longing
the persons they belonged to first.
If we are the collection of our nervous system
sparked and soothed into action by our brain
then who am I?

I catch foreign memories whisking in night and sleep;
other hands these stranger’s nerves have touched—miss.
The love of distant coastline sands on my fingertips,
and thorny fruits I have never eaten leaving childhood hands
sticky.
The memories ache
thunderous like hums trembling beneath my skin.
My right hand reaches so self-assured for things I do not own
in murky pre-dawn light the empty palm always is left lamenting.
What is it that you want that I cannot give?