In the mornings of spring, the birds wake me, playing my brain awake with scales.
I hear them, I am them. For a fleeting moment I fly like fingers across a piano.
I shiver next to Lake Michigan, it is midnight and I imagine the stars
without pollution. The wind promises morning and plays along my spine like a piano.
The trees move outside my window, dancing to an invisible music.
Sometimes I’ll get up and dance with them, spinning to imagined notes on a piano.
When voices feel fortissimo, drums banging at the doors to my ear
I sit in the clear cold winter and it deadens everything to piano.
On Thursdays I wonder if I’m going crazy and I look out at the waves of water
and try to calm my thoughts to their speed. A tuning fork next to a piano.
Each emotion I feel I give a landscape, spend my nights spent shaping them
dreaming them into reality. Mattie, stop thinking, just play the piano.