She is frightened when the poem is done.
The poem whose scrawled yellow pages
have filled her heart for so long
is snatched away.

And the hole in her heart echoes
like a garbage can
thrown against a courtyard
in the city.

She writes to fill that hole
whose quicksand edges
eat her heart out from the muddy center,
and when they take away her pages,
her stuffing, her asbestos insulation,
she rattles
like a palsied hand
sticking out a silver spoon
for sugar.

The poem-in-progress
was the mattress of a bed
where her past made love
to her future,
where her mother hugged her father,
where all the apparitions of the dead
slept like babies
after milk laden bottles.

She has no choice- she will begin again
Her loneliness: the ink of her pen.


~SAS~