Midnight silences.
I cannot abide.
I must cover them. In the white noise hide...with
One fan at each end of my room.
I cannot listen to the glaring quiet.
It only serves to disquiet
my mind.
Gets things to tinkering.
Too often I shift into high gear,
and get to thinking on the tread mill.
All my thoughts swoop in for the kill
with razor-like focus.
When will "badness" begin?
Or is this elemental hocus-pocus?
(How will I know that time
can only tell...)
Silence reminds me of waiting times before.
When I held on, even malingered,
and listened for the creak of the door.
And held my breath even tighter again,
inner strings pulled by nervous fingers.
Sometimes I wanted to be extinguished into
thin air. Have my blanket suddenly flatten out.
Poof...to be gone before any angry shouts...
I'd invent fireworks, imagine distracting flares.
Anything to vanish from his glare.
And rake the air like a broom
from the debris of fear.
(Any mechanism to get him gone and out
of here.)
Perhaps, I'd be
hied off somewhere by an invisible force
to safety or something like it.
Maybe
aliens or fairies could whisk me out.
Or a horse with wings.
It'd have been better than to see
the light spread itself and made a crooked shadow cross
my floor. The man attached breathed alcohol.
Me breathing shallow under blankets.
Still as death but not wishing for it.
Today, alone in bed, without the noise of fans,
I might suddenly awake, and quake, once more, again.
With old imagined monsters hulking in my head.
Silence too often fills me with a sour dread.
The fear mechanism having worn me down
so it doesn't work as it should.
I'm learning to be friends with fear.
Even be thankful for it being near.
I've examined its contents and found the messages
and the clues where I could. Perhaps I'm finally
awake.
But the fans are a habit I'm
not likely yet to break.
They keep me safe from silences.
Fill up my mind with the pretended roar of an ocean
whose voice can soothe me to sleep.
For now, they are a crutch I intend to keep.
God help me if the grid ever goes down.
Copyright September 3, 2012 All rights reserved by Author
Melissa A Howells Meloo from her Tilt-a-World