Mind Games

Around her waist, the gentle embrace of a rust-colored skirt

Like fingers searching for bone,

But this body lost shame long ago.

In the pale light of sterility, of terrifying order,

Women in plastic dresses wipe exhaustion from their sunken eyes.

They move in time with the pulse of each machine,

They are but maids between peeling ebony paint,

Their lives folding within a frame of drywall and paperwork.

Here she was, one of many who felt too much,

Who let the world inside her and shattered in its wake,

Here she was, watching as curtains were drawn each morning,

And the others came and went.

Here she was, as silent as the wealth of the paved lane from which she came.

To observe was her only entertainment,

so she pried her wrists from their grasp at her neck,

and for the first time, she looked around.

At 12 was a boy whose voice came in waves,

Next to a mother who told secrets in her sleep - but oh how she slept,

And the old man in a chair,

This whistling chair which rocked him across water in a battleship he wished to forget.

Then was the child, who lost her childhood,

The child who whispered to shadows and tied knots in her hair.

But the days were full now, full of some sort of song,

And how odd it was that her skirt had grown tight,

That this rust-colored skirt,

Couldn't find bone.