Let's Not Hear Silence

Imagine a silence

Imagine every silence you’ve ever not heard in your life

The silence you are imagining is silent at all

Because you have never actually not heard true silence

Your body’s own functions

Keeping you alive

Drowns out the background noise of the universe

You heart, filled with your own rushing blood

Echoes in your ears as the rest of the world listens

To the sound of your own existence

Perhaps this is why death is so often associated

With silence

Because it is so unnatural to see a body

Once noisy simply by virtue of being

Silenced forever

Not just because the voice

That that former person formerly spoke with

Will never again vibrate it’s way into the air

To be captured by our ears and somehow translated into meaning by our brains

But also because they, in their last millisecond of existence

Knew what true silence was

As their blood stilled in their cooling veins

And their heart stopped trying to keep up

Perhaps they finally heard what no living person will ever know

Absolutely nothing