Alone With Your Thoughts

Sept 12 2011

To have gone through life

and never known silence.

I mean absolute silence,

so deep and sublime

all you can hear

is the hot rush of blood

in your seashell ears.

So never truly by yourself

alone with your thoughts.

No cloistered cell

renouncing talk,

expelled to the desert

wandering, lost.

Your place is here,

the city you never left

and always loved.

And the wilderness, you know something of  —

reassured it exists,

and that’s good enough.

How can I describe such a silence?

Like colour, to a blind man

love, a psychopath,

but worse.

Because this is an absence,

the distillation of less

to less and less,

essential

ineffable

pure.

As impossible as proving a negative.

The unimaginable stillness

of the world at rest.

A held breath,

the seconds left

before your heart contracts

again.

I think you would find this unbearable

and quickly flee,

seeking solace in noise

and constant motion,

the illusion of progress.

Or your over-wrought brain

abhorring the vacuum

would fill it with static

invent a new sound-track

crack under the strain.

I can just imagine

how oppressive this might feel.

A hundred atmospheres

bearing down

on top of you.

The floor of the sea

the density of water.

Or softly swaddled

in countless cotton balls,

unable to move

breathe

think.

Anyway, is silence really possible?

The flush of blood.

The butterfly brush

of air on skin.

The microscopic life

that rushes in.

So you went through life

consoled by noise,

lost

in its anonymity.

Content

to wait for death;

an infinity of silence, then.