Echoes In An Empty Room (rev)

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 reason, strips
aside all causal meaning bound inside
encasing wraps that insulate the tap
of time, clings to surfaces debased.

Rhyme of sleep declaims a dark illusion,
deep confusion drains into the random
spaces interspersed beneath the sheets,
the crumbling breath of gentle death.

In sweeting dreams a nothingness that
firms to trap the feeble feet, arrests the
weakened limbs and wraps what lies a-
floor abandoned in this wretched tomb.

Echoes in an empty room embalm you
in a plaster cast; you laugh aghast until
the dawn, jeer and cry, clap for more,
call encore with reverent voice.

And lie alert alone at night listening for
the closing door that ever shuts you out,
defying sound in deafness bound before
your pleasure’s sense was bought in

gentle arms you’d dearly die for.
© 21 August 2006, I.D. Carswell