And it's not a cry that you hear at night
It's not somebody who's seen the light
It's a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah*
a cry you hear at night (my nighttime vocabulary), the same repertoire as the daytime residents, yelps and screeches, groans and screams, bleating whelps and yelps, grunts and curdling silent low moans and pierced wails, crues du cœur, (cries from the heart) but at night when these orchestral sounds are released without modification, freed from the governor of self-consciousness, the embarrassment of waking mirrored witnesses, atonalities as raw as a violin string snapping, the terrible sounds, twice as harsh as the scrape roughened roaring sound of the hoarse word, raw, when spoken out loud but I count them all as friends, these then my nighttime vocabulary companions.
each deed, each sin, committed, lifelong repetition, dances in a chorus line, across my eyelashes, each demanding my punishment with a different matching sound; the reciprocal noises of the lives I shed, the lives I've taken, the forsaken forsakings, the blatant ones done with no excuse, no pretend rationale, these are my very own
songs of the night, conductor, musician, audience, one for all,
all for me, my torment of endless and relentless unforgiving sonality
And it's not a cry that you hear at night
It's not somebody who's seen the light
It's a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah
Leonard Cohen