Echoes in an empty room

The strident sounds of silence echo
in a darkened room, a beggar’s tomb
of emptied space and barrenness, a
shameful waste, a bitter sadness.
It violates all sense of being strips aside
all causal meaning bound inside the shrinking
wrap that clings to surfaces debased,
insulates the tiny tap of time, a skulking
soulless mirthless mime.

The rhyme of sleep declaims the dark
illusion, deep confusion drains into
the random spaces interspersed beneath
the crumbling sheets, the slowing breath
of gentle death and sweeting dreams
sliding into nothingness that firms to trap
the feeble feet, arrests the weakened limbs
and wraps in comfort all that falls abandoned
in this wretched tomb.

Echoes in an empty room embalm you in
a plaster cast, you laugh aghast until the dawn,
roar and cry and clap your hands for more,
call encore and in your adulation shout
yet lie alert alone at night listening for
the closing door that shuts you out, conspire
to rectify the slight, defying sound in deafness
bound before your pleasure’s sense was
bought in tender arms you’d dearly to die for.
© I.D. Carswell