A cauldron

contest entry

A cauldron of silence sighs
Falling on the old walls
Rising across the fresh paint
The song without an audience
Reverberating in your heart
The half formed becoming whispering in you
The lights and the faces
The shadows and the colored spaces
The clouds racing on the careless sky
Granulated into patches behind you
As the car takes you the terrible music
The loved ones the husbands and wives the support staff
Dancing in the pinpricks of sensibility
The people around you
In various pieces of the broken mirror
The cries the stress the agony the joy the gasping breath
Written on the mongrels hide
The road leading back from traffic jam
And
The road leading out into the night
The women standing on the sides
The beggars the men the charlatans selling bits of solace
The broken the damned the undead the ordinary
The shining of the shallow water in the drain alongside the willow tree,
The fragments left
The beautiful and the unbearable weight
Of the heart and the loins
Left by my bedside
In the eternal morning after your absence in the fog.

29 lines