I have my mother’s ears but Milton’s eyes, blind
to light and empty ink running unrecorded outside
margins into table tops, placemats, lacey doilies.

Shoulders hunched over hazardously.
Chin squatted into clavicles and collars.
This is how the blind write.

As awkward but as carelessly beautiful
as a curse crocheted argument carried out in
sign language symbols. Near-devastating silence.

Only if I could discover sight again.
Only if I could find my greasy framed glasses
as cut as Japanese characters raked into sand.

A few feet away, sexy scenes on screens become smudged smut
sweetened to mixtures, to realities beyond eyelids, as I searched
a letter at a time for words, tracking eggs to find a flea.

Hell on earth is planks of paper
as blank as purgatory. Heaven is a pen,
until it’s in Eugene O’Neill’s arthritic hand.

Inches away, a syllabic alphabet squirms into lines of ants
soldiering the sugar. If I stand and behold the blur,
I can’t see why I even sat.