Everything Becomes Silence

I am hopeless to the night,
praying for the silent,
yet drawn to its collection of noises.

———————————–Haunted
by the fingers of arthritic trees
scraping across my window screen,
forewarning:
———————————–It may be our time.

Alleycats find refuge
in the weeded growth beneath my sill—
their feral chants claw their way up
a creaking fire escape
———————————-towards a crescent-scarred sky.

I can almost hear,
hidden between the timbre of raindrops,
worms crawling from the earth,
left to flop hopelessly
upon the cement—a rudimentary dance
to a moon that will not reply.

Slowly these sounds are buried
in the dirt of the sky. I surrender my eyes,
and everything
———————————becomes silence.

Judson Simmons earned his MFA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College, and holds a BA in English from the University of Houston. He currently resides in Brooklyn, and works at NYU. His poems have appeared in various journals, and his chapbook, The Hallelujah Hour, was published by Amsterdam Press.