The Words That We Speak to the Darkness

Who knows what you have spoken to the darkness. In the bitter watches of the night. When all your life seems to shrink. The walls of your bower closing in about you. A hatch to trammel some wild thing.

“The Words That We Speak to the Darkness”

 

There are words we could speak

That would decimate someone’s heart,

Each one selected and placed with

An assassin’s precision,

Every dotted i a bullet

Fired to pierce their defenses,

Every curving y a stiletto

To rip them apart.

Alone in our rooms we’ve all said them,

The words that we speak to the darkness,

When we knew no one could hear

Except that ever-present void,

The one who consoles us in our sorrows,

Wraps itself around us like a lover,

Let’s us shape it into the object of

Our wrath and our anguish

And let’s us lash out with full fury

In silent screams or echoing quiet,

Absorbing the brunt of the blow

That it shrugs off with immaterial abandon,

Consoling to pass through this as

The words that we speak to the darkness

Traverse it, spent and out of our systems,

Leaving us shaking and remorseful

And still all alone in our rooms,

Heads buried under warm blankets

With eyes still watery but depleted -

For just as the tear-tracks

Down our cheeks are soon drying,

The words that we speak to the darkness

Always fade with the ghostlights

At dawn.