Sentenced To Listen To Yourself

Get ready to meet your maker, you claim,
your face flushed in an agony of red, eyes
insane. My parents are dead, I say, stony
faced and unwavering, there were two of
them; unless you can resurrect both we’re
stuck in this useless frame of reckoning.

I hold the whip hand, you rave, and I’m the one
who decides who lives and who dies. Pleased
to make your acquaintance, I reply, do you do
a number in salvation as well as ‘raisings from
the dead’? Otherwise this conversation takes
the farcical path to the eventually nonsensical.

I can kill you now, you shriek, you know I can.
As easy as squeezing this trigger. Do it then,
I say with candour, get it done. At least I won’t
have to listen to your absurdities – but if you kill
me then there is no-one to listen and you can’t
stand alone, sentenced to listen to yourself.
© 12 May 2007, I.D. Carswell