Underneath the Silence

When the world is consumed by the

indigo black night, the hush swallows

me whole, and underneath that bruised

sky, the light at my desk is the beacon

that lets me capture the feeling. The

feeling that slips through my fingers

during the day but that holds on a little

longer in the empty symphony of

crickets outside that dark window. The

pen to the paper and the ink spills

in the silence, when nothing but the

feeling is left and nothing but the

feeling is to be dissected and communicated

in words that I keep close to me

always. Maybe I won’t write anything, and

I’ll only try to peel back the sky outside

and try to listen to myself, and the words

will continue to spill into my cupped hands,

waiting to be used another night, in

another silence, in another blank piece of

paper that wills to be filled.

Maybe, underneath the silence, I can

hold it, keep it, pin the feeling to

my heart and maybe I’ll remember it

when I’m confronted again by this

thrumming silence that speaks to me

in words that aren’t in the dictionary.

Maybe I’ll have hands big enough to

hold all the words; maybe I’ll have a

heart big enough to hold all the feeling.

I run in that silence, and I will continue

to try to capture that elusive

butterfly that escapes us all.