The Pressing Silence

I feel it pressing in on me,
Pressing, pressing- I feel it smothering—
Like a woman and her first mothering
Of the new life delivered in a plea.
And like the plea, I feel the sea
Of quiet, that won’t set me free.

There is a hum of nothingness
Coming from all of the rooms of the house—
The house—the house that nobody can rouse
The life from the halls where walks the darkness.
In my ears, I hear the breathless,
The breathless voice of the bareness.

But wait- though the window there breaks,
Like shattering glass, shards of sparkling light.
In the light lives the darkness of the night
And on the shards are delivered mistakes—
Mistakes in streams of light like snakes
That crawl in the soul- o’ it aches.

A head is buzzing with the sound
Of the echoes left behind by silence.
And in the silence, serving a sentence
For the crime of a most joyful surround—
The surround in which a life found
The meaning with which the ears pound.

In the silence, there comes a name,
And shards of sparkling glass tumbled like hair,
And in the streams the scent is on the air,
And there is not a night without the flame—
The flame of the light to proclaim
That this life will not be the same.