She Is No Coward

She’s lost in a crowd even when she’s silently alone.
Even when there is not, not even one shadow to entertain her imagination.
But what ‘they’ say or what ‘they’ do is enough
to materialize, real life, in her head, when all else is gone.
I suppose she knows she has to face ‘them’ tomorrow
or the next day or someday, too soon.

There is a voice, stilled, whispering logic behind everything else
in her head. An outline in the doorway and between them - a mob
of dark figures, spinning and pushing.
Sometimes she seems as if she can’t come to the beckoning of it;
she can never get close enough.

Maybe she’s got too many memories wired to the smell
of these things, of anything -
She feels like crawling into a corner, tail between her legs;
she is no coward, but she’s lost her ‘battle plan.’

I was there. I know it was ‘peachy’ when there was nothing to be done
or always something to say.
The madness, she thought, crept in one night, but it was always there.
I imagine she ran too fast in her youth to take notice
or excused it as a glitch in mortality.

She was making head way, I saw it in her eyes;
the wind to her back. Any friends about would vouch for her, as I.

Now she looks, as she feels there is a hole in her head and all of lives’
meaningful things out, drifted up.
Tired and confused like a broken ‘vet’
who’s war cry is now a whisper, crackling
through a tube in his neck.


To Heather
2005