Day after gray day of rain drumming
Against the syntax of window panes
Until you’re no longer a song you know
But a humming orchard of memories
Dropping from your brittle body,
Blowing from room to colossal room,
Up the chimney and into the spuming storm
Where even the birds tend their silence
And the swarm of words you fear bends
Toward a kind of violence that worms
Through every face you left, every
Person you dared hold dear until
You wander poem to poem trying
To explain the thrumming of your tongue,
The stolen emptiness from which you’ve come