Weep

As adrenaline fades away in the immediate
solitude of leaving the frantic house-party,
silence rushes from the dark to swallow me
whole. A brisk walk becomes a slow stroll
before it descends into a laborious slog,
sapping the little energy remaining from a
once boundless supply. Faceless strangers
of the night seem to sneer from within the
safety of their hoods, shadows veiling features.
And as I move less and less, a scratching
sound begins inside my mind, as if some thought,
some wraith-like truth long buried beneath
the layers of deceit and denial, longed to
creep up from hiding and remind me of its
existence. Drops fall softly like tears of the
stars as my progress grounds to an utter halt
outside the front garden of a childhood friend
and real-time alcoholic, lost to the fine print
of what love and life and truth really are -
but the scratching gets louder, suffocating
other remedial trains on rails toward dead ends.
The scratching stops, replaced by complete
nothingness as I gaze blankly ahead into the void,
And then I can hear only one thing in the night
but it comes from inside my own head:
it is the sound of weeping, tainted and pitiful.