Clangings

Schizophrenia may be characterized by a surfeit of language, a refurbishment of our used up words with musical connections every day speech and sense cannot provide. These riffs are “clangings,” and Cramer imagines them into a poetic narrative that exults in both aural richness and words’ power to evoke an interior landscape whose strangeness is intimate, unsteady, and stirring.

I hear the dinner plates gossip

Mom collected to a hundred.

My friends say get on board,

but I'm not bored. Dad's a nap

lying by the fire. That's why

when radios broadcast news,

news broadcast from radios

gives air to my kinship, Dickey,

who says he'd go dead if ever

I discovered him to them.

I took care, then, the last time

bedrooms banged, to tape over

the outlets, swipe the prints

off DVDs, weep up the tea

stains where once was coffee.

Not one seep from him since.