Plaintive Note Motel

Mother, are you lonely? I hear you sigh, then
moan in steady beats while you sleep beside me,
wounded moans, some tragedy never told me
               strangling your song-pipe.

Breath by breath, the moaning of Mother reddens,
death by drugs, flushed fugue, how she suffers sigh-sick
groans, while I, as always her daughter-stranger,
               ride my red wagons,

twist and trickle down on my twin slim bed in
Plaintive Note Motel, where we stay to witness
Kenny’s wedding. Marriage, was that the trouble?
               Moaning, my mother’s

stone unturned; a shot in the dark, my guesses.
Burned is Mother’s everyday state, her fury
blackness brushes by on my rising nowhere,
               faster and faster.