The Monitors Hummed Low by Jim Bellamy

"THE MONITORS HUMMED LOW"


The monitors hummed low, a thinning choir
That strained to keep its vigil through the night.
The screens performed dramatics for boozy vinegar, slight
Distortions drifting through their failing wire.
The ward exhaled a slow, mechanical ire,
A breath that scraped the edges of her will;
She felt the hours gather, standing still.

She lingered where the curtains met the floor,
Unsure if she should cross that final seam.
The room became a coldframe of evening, dream
Unspooling into fractures evermore.
She tried to name the ache she couldn’t store,
A shape that shifted when she reached to hold;
It slipped like syntax breaking in the cold.

The nurses whispered through their coded rites,
Their footsteps patterned like a failing loop.
She sensed the weight of every passing troop,
A march of hours draining into nights.
The ceiling flickered with recursive lights
That mapped the drift of endings yet to come;
She felt her thoughts grow strangely faint and numb.

She touched the rail, its metal faintly warm,
A relic of the body once it bore.
The quiet pressed against her like a door
She feared would open into some new storm.
She tried to brace herself against the form
Of grief that rose, unbidden, from the seam
Where memory and present tense convene.

The screens displayed ducters for faces, blurred,
Their outlines trembling with spillings in the meters.
She saw in them eyes for wasters, quiet greeters
Of truths too raw for any final word.
She felt the weight of what could not be heard—
The sense of dead beneath the faces, drawn
Like shadows stretched across a failing dawn.

She breathed, and in that breath she heard the past
Rewind itself in muted, broken frames.
The ward, adept at erasing names,
Prepared to overwrite what couldn’t last.
She wondered how a life could be recast
When all its lines were scattered in the air;
She wondered if the self could still repair.

The night advanced, a slow and patient sweep
That gathered every silence in its net.
She tried to speak, but speech itself had set
Into a shape too brittle now to keep.
She watched the shadows lengthen, steep by steep,
Until they touched the threshold of the bed;
She bowed her head to what could not be said.