Sensory Deprivation

I have one eye which weeps;
the other’s cold stare looks down.

I do not see, with
my dark-adapted eye,
my reflection in the mirror
nor the world as it is behind me
as if perpetual dusk has fallen
in this room, its light,
dimmed by failure,
flickering.

I have vision,
another vision in which
I am flying above the weather,
looking down on an empty world,
glimpsing it through ragged cloud;
I have nothing but contempt
for those who laid
it waste.

I have one deaf ear and one
which hears the planet muttering.

I hear its surfaces
scrape against each other
compressing today into tomorrow
while time degrades to a hoarse whisper
incessantly vibrating the tympanic membrane
rushing like water in the semicircular canals
levering hammer, anvil, and stirrup
till the world turns to grindstone
in the echoing bones inside
my shell-shaped ears.

Tinnitus
like a high singing
masks the dull sound
of nothing, rings alarm bells
inside my head, while my heart’s
irregular rhythm syncopates
my blood, sends a tremor
shuddering in my
bones.

I cannot see
the huddled millions waiting,
not one of them coming home;

I do not hear them cry out.

© BH, 2018

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Bruce Springsteen’s– Good Eye – from the album, Working On A Dream:

"I was standing by the river
where the cold black water runs
I had my good eye to the dark
and my blind eye to the sun…"

This was a starting point of a kind. But then it got all planetary with anatomy worked through. Mostly it’s about our ever-increasing, degraded perception. Seeing what we want to see and disregarding the rest. But that’s another song, another quote.