When my friend’s tongue seized up, writhing

in its chamber, it must have reached for something,

anything, it seemed, though who was I to tell?
The hour took forever, when, out of the muck

of syllable and stutter, he said, shit, and I knew

a barrier had broken, the first bricks tumbling
out of his mouth. Out of the warehouse district

of the southern brain, graffitied in obscenities

and roses: the throat of a motor that won’t clear,
won’t turn over, but we were going somewhere.

Not progress as we knew it, no, but what you hear

gasp in a shattered object, or creak in the chains
of swing sets in the breeze. A little damage is always

the first to arrive, last to go. Even silence breaks

something when it breaks, and if the music’s good,
your ribcage shakes, your heart flits on its trapeze.

If you are listening, you know, the way a garden

knows where to spread its net, to clutch an earth
whose body hangs over the dark of the other side.

For it is always there, the fundament, the stranger,

the midnight sky. I saw it in eye of the bewildered
creature, as we rode in the ambulance together.

Welcome back, I said, although I never heard him

curse before. Or after. Welcome back, my friend.