A Voice of My Own

For years it had flown through dim canyons, hollows where the mute sheltered in echoing caves. Poems shifted loose and gearless. Words darted for cover as if caught in an empty bell tower. On tongue-chilled days it would croon inarticulately as it sang beneath jawbone rafters. Then one drunken night I felt it clearing its windpipes, coaching a squeaky organ into yawps of utterance. I can see it now, a raw unlovely thing, a creature hammered through gurgling fissures, grown stark with a transpiring clarity. I would mislay it like a lost penny, go crazy to find its untrod trail again, then it would return like a tramp begging at my door. I hear it knocking now – a homeless angel eager to shed the next paltry revelation in a foundling language. No longer is it a chance sighting, no longer a luminous flutter on dark walls; it is red of lip, a painted vowel in my unbolted mouth. A mouth that now divulges, and sometimes in a dull turning year may say something worth transcribing for the ears of other madmen.