kevdonahue.com

A poem about the fragility of my attention.

Brains have bones.
That’s dumb, right?
Except—how else
to explain the form

of my thoughts,
the broken-ness of
my attention?

It explains a lot,
how goddamn lost
I get in this head,
to learn that I broke
the bones in my brain.

The bones in my brain
give shape to my thoughts.
They stitch a matrix
of feeling to experience,
of idea to intuition.

The bones in my brain
are apt to snap.
What a wonder
they reset so quickly!

My wife told me
“Brains have bones”
one recent morning
and when I stopped

chuckling, I thought:
bones in my brain, yes.