Submit your work, meet writers and drop the ads. Become a member
 
 Jan 2018 Jonathan Witte
r
Silence comes
  from bones
that rot in the Earth
beneath a wet stone
with a carved name
   white as good teeth
in a hard jaw.

Silence is
  a homerun some kid
hit in Tennessee
in 1973 and a father
remembering the ball
  going like a bullet
deep into left center.

Silence is
  a brother grimacing
whispering your name,
through salt
  and tears on his cheeks,
one last time.

Silence, it just is...
  quiet, like pain.
Mind, like a deciduous forest
has lost all its foliage,
all leaves torn away
by the autumnal blasts

The brain where great schemes were concocted
is now an abyss where spiders sway
It is bare – dismally barren
of all memories – sweet and sour
Like a kite afloat in the boundless sky
moving nowhere, but as the wind directs,
cut out from the past, turned from the present
with the future yet to surge from the abyss
or like serpents intertwining,    
hissing in turmoil within the brain,
unable to sense the gusty blast,
or hear the whispering air,
dead to sounds that disturb,
deaf to songs that soothe,
like a phantom he moves weird,
drifting far away
to a space and time impenetrable  
with nothing to make the mind agog
or depress it to let out a sigh.

Loitering on roads without hurrying feet
with no bliss coming on the way
to run or hasten to embrace
or fear to be missed sore
passing through dark labyrinthine tunnels
forever barred with no exit
churned in oblivion, oblivious of all,
he remains a spectral facsimile
of his onetime self
plummeting into a black hole

The pulse of a heart beat
is all that keeps him alive,  
all else is dead…… !  
with dreary nights ahead
that shall not know another morrow
Only others can throw a little light in the dark lives of its hapless victims!

(With a heart heavy with gratitude, let me acknowledge my poet friend -  Kim Johanna Baker who gave sunshine to my poem who has thus honored me several times !)
 Jan 2018 Jonathan Witte
katie
you let
the pills
flow
down
your neck
and wait.
wait for the life
to grow
and the
pain to
slow.
wait for
that feeling
when you
will know.
but certainty
is a story.
a distant
object
bobbing
across
the current.
and that
comfort
becomes an
absence
so deep it
resounds
like cymbals
in your
ears as you
sleep.
Next page