POEM — There’s a Sister Missing

I lie asleep breeding pensive dreams of my sister, that reign over the darkness

So very often they’re explored with maladjusted sight, through an enabling shroud

Dressed like a paper doll from the 50’s, she talks to herself with contentment

A few hundred times she’s lived in my dreams, with slumbering breath, I call to her aloud

In my purgatorial sleep, on tip toes she creeps to kiss her shadow goodnight

I don’t mind admitting, those skeletons in the closet do not keep good company

Much like a strewn puzzle with missing pieces, her image strains to survive the hour

While the ghostly ruins of her memory are drawn into the quicksand of fantasy

All her misled yesterdays, God knows, ultimately never found there whereabouts

Yet nightly appearances of her, I can dip into at will and she’s by my side

So intimately acquainted with her scent, which went out of fashion all those years ago

I weep for her instabilities, the stigma, mother from her pained heart sought to hide

With a sigh, I regret to say, in between undistinguishable worlds is where she dwelled

Being overcome by fear, was my least favorite of her many personalities

Utterly consumed, she’d sit by her window, the only connection to a real life

A self-appointed sentinel, her phobic eyes darted as she nursed anxieties

With those secluded ruminations, her gaze was of a stranger staring back at me

When I think of it now, I know we were all aware of her ungoverned madness

Living in that house of make believe, I looked away, wiping my hands of secrets

In the spirit of sisterhood, I bit my tongue and denial stirred a new kind of sadness

Detachment had a way of compensating for her miscarried reasoning traits

But now reality, like a helpless creature, squirms to escape from its cubbyhole

Unfathomable thoughts fill my mind, somehow I sense one of us has lost our footing

No more swept away happy lies, a feeling of dread takes residence in my soul

“Time for your meds, wake up”, the nurse said rattling her keys, “Don’t make me call your sister”

Opening my watery eyes once more to the asylum’s attendant at the gate of stone

Each morning I let my sister go. What’s certain is there’s a missing sister and she is me

As if that weren’t hard enough to bear, my cell’s the one with decades of ivy grown

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