WHEN THE MUSIC'S OVER (TURN OUT THE LIGHTS)


And so the performance
was over, the last words

of the tragic opera
fading, the tambourine

still chillingly alive
and shimmering like God's

breath, I lay on my cot
in the dark and waited for

it to come, in one void,
a wave of nothingness

crashing over me,
the room drenched in drama,

but there was no God
moment, no God consciousness,

no light, no stellar scream,
no cosmic swirl, instead

the room filled with dark matter,
a muffled absence,

not a terror or dread
or even an onrush

of regret, just a darkness
spreading its terrible weight,

no relief from its anguish,
just nothing, nothing,

nothing at all, until
the mind drifted away on

this dark matter spreading
in the nooks and crannies,

just diminished and lost
in the great blindness,

it was all black gravity,
I did not expect to

awaken, certainly
not in the closet,

fingers scraping plaster,
head clunking the wall,

the edge of death, the brink
of life, a trap, and the

long moan, the 3AM
freight droning, my eyes

cold stones and blind, dead stars,
I did not expect this,

this gulf, this muffled need,
this persistent voice

at the heart of something,
this anger, this stupid rage,

this lone whisper of light
shouting. For days I sat

alone, a lump, an
insubstantial substance,

something, consciousness
watching as the ghosts

appeared and whispered
in some unknowable tongue,

voices of the dead and living
indistinct, smothered,

the weight of lifelessness
itself, I had almost

joined them, these ancestors
waiting all around us,

drifting in orbit, my mind
a dead star, a cold

stone in my head slowly
warming, returning to

the grand opera, the carnival
of the senses and the

absurd roar, the theorems
and proofs I once understood

slowly unraveling into order:
a point, a ray, a line,

the universe was giving way
to tiny chunks of routine,

and soon enough, a
reprise, an encore,

the show must go on, you know,
the opera never truly

ends, the last shuddering
note gives way to the first,

you remain in motion,
only the direction shifts.


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