if only the brain could be diagrammed or declined

sentence fragments swill about in my brain and i can't get any of them to coalesce, to form rational thoughts. most of them are stolen anyway, long-dead writers, printed words, i cannot compete. time is all jumpy and this weekend has been 16 years long and i am no smarter. monday afternoon. that hour of the day one has to close the drapes, light the lamps. here is where i decline Latin nouns, puella, puellae, puellae, puellam, puella, where i retreat to long-dead languages because if no one knows them no one will recognize my partial failures. skittery words and hanging clauses. ablative absolute: Rome having been seen,

and then there is nothing. a nail on the ground. a cigarette butt of mine from yesterday still in the gutter that i don't remember having smoked. this cigarette having been smoked, vanilla frosting and my clean red hair. how therapy is like learning language from a textbook and you think you've got it, the grammar makes sense, complex sentences even, you know those ablative absolutes, gerunds, the jussive case, those coping mechanisms, and then you move on to the Aeneid and you can't read a thing and Vergil is switching up tenses in paragraph-long sentences and too many nouns in the 4th declension with the same endings and you cannot find the goddamn subject buried in all that muck. cannot calm the panic. puellae, puellarum, puellis, puellas, puellis. focus on the tangible. hic, haec, hoc. the cat in my arms. my shaking hands. what color are they. huius, huius, huius, huic, huic, huic. laughter outside the window. that i am not part of. hunc, hanc, hoc.

and the metaphors that are beautiful and brilliant until spoken aloud. i am dragging behind me too many dead and maimed selves and--

i have lost the meaning. ego, mei, mihi, me, me. et tu, tui, tibi, te, te. i forget the negative. i was never very good at saying no. just use nihil. nothing.

repetition and order. trying to reclaim the self. whatever that is. let us conjugate verbs in order to do this, not nouns. let us use the subjunctive because it's a bit hazier, a bit more manageable at this time. it may be that we are just a cluster of our actions. sum, es, est, sumus, estis, sunt,future, ero, eris, erit, erimus, eritis, erunt. am i nihil more than a sum of my past, eram, eras, erat, eramus, eratis, erant, dragging these charred selves behind?

hanc puellam sum. has puellas sum. hac puella afflictata, debet se reperire ut salvam esse. unus dies, haec puella se laudabit. lingua Latina erit. because salvus means both to be safe and to be whole.