There is a silence that screams before demolition…
a breath that tastes of iron and confession.
The moon leans too close,
a voyeur to the last trembling light
on the skin of something alive once,
now rotting slow beneath its own promise.
Shadows kneel like disciples…
worshiping the absence that made them….
Somewhere…
a clock coughs up its final tick,
and the air thickens with the sound
of prayers forgetting their words.
You can feel the dark thinking.
It knows your name;
the secret one you never said aloud.
It waits with patience,
to devour you
to remind you
that all light eventually
returns home to it.
The trees do not whisper.
They bear witness.
Crooked fingers clawing at a sky
that has already turned its back.
Even the stars avert their eyes
when the mouth of night
opens wide enough
to swallow sound, soul,
and the shape of hope.
Beneath your feet,
the earth forgets your footsteps.
The ground no longer remembers
the warmth of the living.
Everything slows to a crawl;
then stillness,
then the intimate noise of nothing.
You reach for something,
a name, a light, a God.
But it crumbles like old ash
between your trembling fingers.
The dark does not mock you.
It does not laugh.
It simply surrounds your existence,
reminding you that it was always here,
waiting behind the thin veil of the choices
you called reality.
There is no punishment.
Only inheritance.
This is the silence that holds the world
when even the ghosts have forgotten
how to speak.
And still,
you kneel,
shivering,
at the edge of something
older than death,
beneath the open, patient mouth of night.