Passing

Somebody died here, right in this room;
someone hung her clothes on the bracket,
where my umbrella folds its ominous bat wings.
Someone sat on that porch each rainy evening,
with a bowl of soup in her folded hands.
and may be sang with a sad face
to the terrible mirror woman.
Someone wrote, sang, cursed and quaked,
to break the numbing curse of steel,
the absurd fear of white walls and pills.
Even somebody before her
who hated this wallpaper,(my once removed ancestor)
 must have been scratching these walls and paper,
 in a smitten frenzy, with a stolen pen.