There’s a doll in the duct above my bed,
she watches me sleep with a cracked-up head.
Her eye’s on a spring and it swings with the breeze,
and sometimes she whispers through the vents with a wheeze.
She knows my dreams, she’s stitched to the wall,
hung by her smile in the hospital crawl.
She giggles at night when I start to pray,
says, “If you break enough, they’ll take you away.”
The doll in the ducts, she sings to the wires,
sewn from regrets and funeral choirs.
She dances in lint, wears gowns of disease,
and stitches my thoughts back crooked with ease.
I asked her once why she never blinks,
she said, “Because blinding truth never shrinks.”
Then she spun in a circle and bit her own hand,
and whispered, “Soon, you’ll understand.”
The nurses pretend she’s not there at all,
but I hear her dragging through every wall.
She tells me jokes made of scissors and skin,
and I laugh till my sanity caves in.
If you see her shadow on the tile,
don’t follow the grin or the crooked smile.
She’ll tell you truths that don’t forgive,
and teach you how the broken live.
Now she crawls in the pipes of my mind,
tugging at memories I tried to bind.
And I smile, I weep, I wheeze with grace,
the duct-doll queen wears my face.