Some Kind of Silence
Whispers through the wallpaper.
Plaster cracking in the hollow of your throats.
I hear whistles like breathy words. Like bird languages, long and quick, like my husband telling the dogs to come inside.
But the drumming hum keeps coming, telling me to start making quilts for captives, adorned with pebbles and winks.
Craft cradles for babies with too-tired eyes who choose not to cry anymore.
The innermost whistles pressing against wooden panels won’t wake up the neighbors but I hear them murmur through the marrow in my bones.
Pushing through the sick syrupy plasma, thick and hesitant to echo for anyone but me.
The wild eyes on the other side of the wall, through winks and through blinks, say I make cradles for nothing because I am just crazy.
And the squint worthy words tell me to forget to see stars.
I thought madness was done with this next mouthful of medication but the walls seethe and creep, pushing pus and crammed wails through their sutures.
I click my tongue as I sit and I ache, staying still and praying for some kind of silence.
I am scared and full of noises that no one else hears.
I tilt my head trying to capture the sirens and whistle to the babies who choose to not open their eyes anymore.
And I desperately want to stitch together blankets of wallpaper and skin for the creatures caught in my mind.
But instead I close my eyes viciously and I grip my shoulders violently and I rock and I try to block out the din of the dying but I can’t fall asleep because I am too crazy to be tucked in.
So I swallow my fist and I sift through my tears and I wait and I wonder when the voices will stop teaching me how to be lonely enough to die.
