How soft your voice, night.
how shrill your cries in silence
do echo around the emeralds
my mother gave me to see through.
melancholy sloth cradles me
in your unholy arms,
dark with nothing for me,
dark with coal on my hands.
it has been said,
“Give me liberty or
Give me death”,
though I must speculate
where liberty is –
does it sit alone in rocking chairs
with attics falling down around it?
what freedom you bestow on us!
what liberty we find in your empty arms!
great things have been lost
in the awe of your expanse –
soft murmurs of crying
muffled by your blindness.
is that your voice, Night,
the cries of us all
wailing on your shadow walls,
pounding our fists,
begging your freedom
into the nothing that
scares us most?
detest my sorrow,
my whispers fall short
of your love,
not for not trying,
not for nothing –
it’s more than before
but I’m missing
some times.
some things.
I have begged you
time over times gone
for entrance to your dark cave;
I have cursed you, night
for your genteel dismissals
on platters of sunrise.
I desire your empty bliss
free from these shapes
that come in my dreams.
should I open my heart to you
with a scalpel of your moon light?
I would bleed my breath of existence
into your void
to see your visions in black.
I will shear off my toes –
roots into this folly circus,
so I can fall into you
and one day,
you will find me in the grass
staring into you,
with dull eyes,
and you will accept me
and stifle my whimpers
with your emptiness in love.
what value has my love
when it is not mine,
when my heart can’t feel
and my eyes can’t see,
my tongue dry and languid?
what conquest am I
when I cannot know you?