I and II

I.
There was a child called Silence
who felt no pain.
She walked the empty halls without her shoes
and tip-toed through waters
sprung like wellsprings of wishing pennies
that joined in junction at the sea with hazy storm-cloud rain.
She learned to love it,
because she was drenched and no boats came to take her in.
There were no scars on her flesh to see,
but a small one at her heart,
where she'd long ago removed her treasures
to hide them in the walls with pictures painted with eyes closed—
and no one else could see what she saw in them.
Her toes were cold and fingers numb,
and fire engines called to each other to race the roads
inside her veins, the alarms sounded in her brain,
and called for paper swans to fly out her mouth and tell the world
she's not home.

II.
I put the left foot out first and took my dive,
tricked
by lack of my native tongue
into self-entrapment of the first degree.
And in the grey haze two shapes rose up,
to vanquish my lungs and beat my memories about my eyes—
the one was cold and the other red:
I think maybe they'd both been here before.
She said don't stay out too late,
you'll catch your death in candle light—
goodnight.
So naturally I died.
Three days and nights sang me up a hundred times,
and shadows put me in the ground with four walls and both at my back a hundred times too
oh how I felt you, oh how I felt you in the rain.
Bare feet told me I had shorn the letter They had placed around my neck,
but really I had only learned to let folded origami feelings
fly out and wave for me.
To beat around my head,
and make up marvelous epiphanies.
And how to count the holes inside my treasure chest.