A Ringing Answered

Blindness blasted into pieces
each remaining sense so boldly
like a brazen bullhorn colonizing,
completely quieting each lone forgotten
particle of bullied muffled fog.
The skinny bed, hot and wet--
the furtive clutching
of her cramped and wasted
cornstalk limbs,
a roadside trap especially when
the far thin voices came
with lukewarm porridge or the half crunch
of limp and tasteless vegetables
on a tray or crooked table
for the weak and wrinkled lap.

Swirling consonants and vowels,
her caved-in sentence stretched
for many winding miles,
meaning melted deep within
a cratered furnace of the mountain.

There was no place
or time
or person
in the foreign alleys
the baking backstreets
to tell the how
or why of this
which happened
yet had emptied
out her life.

The rotting stink of fiery noise, the bursting
urge to name the need to take a piss,
colored months of flaming terror
and this turgid being on her back.

The turgid being on her back
swollen fragments of incoherence,
broken listless shards of days
in high school, a young girl with
her i-pod braids and boyfriends
and the woeful day she picked up
the strident and seductive
relentless brutal phone.

Oh, how does hope
that ‘thing with feathers’
crash so bad, dive too fast
to bring but fevered visions
of black and sour weather
to us of humankind?