I

An invisible bird fell
Into Morgan’s eye
When she was four.
A black cockatoo, she said.
She was the only one who got to see it,
Everyone just laughed.
That was the end of her.
It got stuck at the back of her sight,
Twisting, squawking, and winding
Itself tighter into her fly-paper retina. 

She didn’t use small words anymore,
Because small words didn’t cut deep enough to get the bird out.
If she ever wanted to really see that bird again,
To see its black tar feathers melting into air again,
She had to break it out with titanium hammer words.
With words that made her brain’s wrinkles unravel and rearrange,
Until a four year old girl could pull an
Invisible, dead bird out of her eye and
Make it fly again.
And when she did, she ate it.

II

She coughed them up when she was twelve,
All the words that got caught in her throat,
All the words that had begun to swarm
And pill-bug pop on her tongue.
Those big words were now hunting in packs
For the frogs and fairies,
The laughing hats and angry fingernails,
For the butter-nut squash mermaids, rotted onyx, and combing camel hair weaves onto bald heads.
They kept bubbling up behind Morgan’s eye,
Or getting wedged in her ear,
Or burrowing up from her pillow and
Creating blisters under her skin at night
That she would carry around under
A conventional sun.
She coughed them up into a crinkling white tub.
She polished each of them off until they shined.
And then she drowned them.

Each of them she pushed into the black water and
Pressed hard until they burst in coughing whispers,
Leaving stains on white.
She did this every night for a year,
Until her thousands of fathers' figures found the bathroom filled with
So many word corpses that it was soot covered.
Spent bodies that could have been merging into solid color and getting
Lost on the walls.

He made her clean that year,
That was years,
Until only their favorite remained.
Until his smiles were seen reflected between
Morgan’s zombie words
That could only dance a jitter-bug Morgan hadn’t learned.

III

When Morgan was twenty, she
Began collecting only small words again.
No one saw those black birds,
Or dirty walls,
Or night haired, stone fish women
In small words.

Using them as delicate scalpels,
She wore away the layer
Of reality floating just past her bed’s corners and
Morgan found where to hide herself.
Where to crack open and pile
The words set each in separate
Boxes under separate headings
With separate heads,
And separate souls,
And separate meanings,
And separate desires,
And fold them back in on themselves.
She gleaned the means to close the corners of her world
At the corners of her bed
Without an atlas or an index.
She started to forget about them,
Those dark things that made the world
So bright that people turned away.

IV

But at thirty-five Morgan’s corners got so full
That they started to break,
They were mothers filled with teratuplets
And their stomachs were starting to open
Up at the center. 
And when they came tumbling out,
Morgan couldn’t separate them so easily.
Nouns weren’t so happy with verbs
And adjectives started hugging each other
Until they made murky crystals
That hung as cocoons do after a
Child crawls out of them.
And Morgan was only watching Morgan,
Watching the bits of herself that were
Confusing,
That were hard diamonds,
That were dripping, old refuse,
That were crying and vomiting at the same time,
And Morgan was frustrating again.
Morgan began filling the room
With Morgan,
More and more Morgan.

And so finally, at fifty,
Morgan had turned a world
Of simple light with its seven colors
Back to black.
It began to flap its wings,
Its great spider-leg wings
With bear fur lining and pig skin centers draped in black tar feathers.
It was carrying in its seaweed claws
And in its tree bark beak,
Morgan’s words that came in
Skulls blossomed open with pink and white,
Tongues that could become legs,
Snails that hid in their shells not slime nor slug, but people’s smiling faces,
And other shapes that didn’t fit easily in those corners which made
People nod and “Ah-Ha, I see,”
But be blind and start to want again.