SCAMPER
Balcony, cigarette, whiskey.
Brother’s inside the ward again,
the grim voices inside his head again.
There’s a letter I want to write to him
to remedy all of this.
I’ve even split with my girl—
she’s dancing at her brother’s wedding as
I’m trying to write a letter to mine
but when he gets out of the ward
I want to have something left to say.
I could wave to him from here,
the ward a block away,
and he could wave to me
from behind its tinted glass.
When I last visited him in there
we sat behind a thick window
and couldn’t hear the helicopter landing
at the hospital across the street,
like the helicopter was put on mute—
if we were blind it didn’t exist.
I couldn’t speak.
The hushed voices in the room
were louder than the giant spinning blades.
Then a woman screamed—
her nightgown tickled her toes and she screamed
that she was being touched—
I’M BEING TOUCHED!
The scream a blinding light that revolved
behind my eyes. The scream a revolving light
in the middle of a dark ocean,
land too distant to hear.
I looked at my brother.
He looked past me.
Balcony, cigarette, whiskey.
From the shadows comes a furtive fox
sniffing the parking lot below.
Reddest fox I’ve ever seen.
Its chest matted with an open wound,
nervous, it looks over its shoulder,
ears flickering to hear.
Lone fox, I whisper,
and I can feel it
like it’s hanging right here
just over the balustrade
and within my trembling hands—
this bloody fur, this feverish beast
that slips through my fingers
and scampers back to the shadows
like I never ever saw it coming.
Mathias Nelson: My book, DIP MY PACIFIER IN WHISKEY, was published by NYQ Books. Read it.
