The Day that I Can Hear It

Darkness climbing walls of undeniable parity, between the confiscated rulings 

and the indiscriminate monsters of the night. All systematic and subtle,

as we claw and clatter towards some understanding of the terror 

in our threadbare souls. And she crowds the corners of my 

consciousness, the ridiculous remittance that holds me 

at arm’s length. Cackles, calls me caustically, 

by a name I don’t call myself, except 

when I’m honest, except when 

the precepts and edifice 

of my being 

wither 

away 

into a haunted reality of what is and what isn’t.

For I am no hero, no concealed weapon, no mystery. I am flesh. I am bone. 

I am wandering resolution desperate for a home, but cursed 

never to find it. And, I hold it to my chest, this indiscriminate 

circumstance. I caress it and call it my own.  But she, 

this devil well disguised, this simplistic 

caustic carnivore, is persistent 

in her whispers. All is lost, 

she says. All is finite 

and fallible. You 

will die, as you 

have lived, 

and no 

truth 

can sway that momentum. 

No light can derail the darkness.

And here, in the infinite loop of my cluttered conscience, broken by the weight 

of the depth of possibility, of potential presupposition, of chances missed, 

and chances untaken, I listen to her call. I hold it to the light. I wallow 

in its truth that I am nothing. And here, in the deepening cavern 

of desperation and reality, in the midst of a personalized 

and comfortable corner of hell, I await the final verdict, 

that all is finite and fallible, that I will die 

as I have lived.

Desperate, I whisper simple syntax, divining devastation from deliverance, praying 

for an object of my prayers Then, as soon as the tide has taken me, 

when the hope has hollowed out, when my cancer is complete, 

I hear it.

The truth that I am nothing, and from nothing will I start to swell

As another voice, faint but founded, swirls in the silence, dances through the stillness, dips deeply into the depths of my despair.

You. 

Empathetic entity,

Monstrous mystery, 

Heavenly happenstance

Awaken within me. Speak in standards, of life and death and resurrection. 

And wait... 

For the day that I can hear it.