Some How Poem by Cheng Zheng

A single note strikes
the shattered silence
like a thousand spikes,
stabbing with cold indifference.

Cloaked in the shadows
of the morning sun,
a child sits, forlorn, on her piano seat.

The wind’s slithering tentacles
lift her skirt a mere inch.
She is bowed by manacles,
playing a painful note like a tuneless finch.

I stand afar,
looking with perverse sympathy.

The note drones on and on;
her life’s broken song.
All harmony has gone,
say to this cruel world, “so long”.

She lifts her head,
and beneath her dark unkempt hair
two dead
eyes pierce me with an empty stare.

Mesmerized by those haunting eyes,
embedded like jewels in her head,
I opened my mouth,
but my soul had already fled.

A face chiselled from granite and lead,
yet whose beauty mocked her like a cruel divine joke.
I feel my senses become aroused
as pity and greed coalesce.

An understanding, so acute,
of how Lady Fate plays her cards,
yet I shiver to think but cannot refute,
that I would have played them too.

Tears blur my vision of those unblinking eyes,
robbed of all why,
left only with some how,
as the note stabs me again and again.