Gone

there was a hush this morning,
the kind of eerie nothing
when even pasty cobwebs
don’t stir in the uneven breath of watchful feet,
they had all gone,
every last one of them,
packed their heavy maudlin bags
and taken off like murky evil
at the first blink of dawn;

for days they had bickered
and harangued in strident tongues,
held hands in honeyed monochrome,
copulated feverishly,
cheating on one another,
building incomprehensible cages
where they held my words hostage,
and now, strangely,
now they were gone;

as if my every thought,
infested with toxic emotions,
had been distilled through the fine sieve of night,
and answers floated,
with hastily fastened fins,
their ink bleeding into the
clear lake of light;

but reason laughed and whirled,
like rapture in Rumi’s eyes,
infinitesimal matter orbiting
a translucent core,
in a frenzy of timelessness,
in a senseless craving,
in a bottomless cry
for joy;

but all there was
was this unspeaking answer,
like a five-pointed crystal glow,
dissolving into a spectrum of layered light,
in a silent emptiness
that crept into the little hollows
where emotions once lived;
the hush this morning
coating my trembling hand,
that reached, unfeeling,
through the pitying void.