They say home is the place you never escape
                               even in nightmare

Here in the hospital
    on her dark island
        with no other family to tend
           her life at long last stopped misleading her

The sound rose and fell in waves
time flapped about, wings broken
by morning that sound never happened

He spoke then
    in beta-waves and millimeters of mercury
               lobes and ventricles and hematomas

meaningless, trivial, stupid, lifestealing words
like the hard plastic eyes of girlhood dolls
the words had to mean something

Three words would save her.  
But all her muscles couldn't force one sound.

At any moment her hands would break free and fly away
   spatter-spots on the glass below
      in some weirdly-cut, handheld-camera 
         reality show.

The mind can make a hell of heaven, or so they say.
She looks back, sees the nowhere she's been.

She would savor every baby step back, though
down into enslavement in that crumbling house
anything to convince them she was still worthy of love.

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