It felt like a small village
held idle
like a hand would
the needle over vinyl.
I can hear the static
dripping into my ears -
drums.
The silence of sound.
Patients turning over,
rustling linen,
coughing the air of sleep;
disease, pleads,
medicated dream.
Dripping down
into my inner ear
beating like rain
on bat-winged
umbrellas. I watch.
A pattering of God’s tears
overhead, my umbrella
a dying neighbor’s denial of Him.
Who am I
to heed you from your decadent,
opium-covered seizure?
Inside your room I drape
my thoughts over
the back of the worn leather chair
and sit only an arm’s distance of air
away, unlike your tethered wings
clamped down to dampen sweaty
beats of chested gasps.
I keep a steady tapping of feet,
much like the static from the record player,
watching over your dressings reddening,
your unrest between songs.
Hospitals seem to be
the only places in the world
where death and birth resemble
a scientific anomaly.
I don’t want to grasp the rest. I
feel distant and collected
like a train station in the early morning,
empty from epidemic,
or like the patches of blood
subject to clotting,
where feathers used to be,
replaced by pillows and frail bone
indenting sheets.
