It comes before the seeing,
a shifting in the room,
as though the shadows gathered up
to make themselves a tomb.
🕳️🕳️🕳️🕳️
No sound to mark the stranger,
no step upon the stair,
and yet the neck grows certain
something occupies the there.
🕳️🕳️🕳️🕳️
The spine becomes its own alarm
before the mind has dressed.
The body turns its verdict in
before the court convenes, confessed.
🕳️🕳️🕳️🕳️
I looked; the corner held its peace.
The doorway merely stood.
And yet the looking changed me some,
the way a verdict would.
🕳️🕳️🕳️🕳️
For proof requires a solid thing;
a shadow does not bleed.
And so, the reasonable self
dismisses what the sinews read.
🕳️🕳️🕳️🕳️
And yet the dark behind my back
grows denser than the front,
as though the universe conspires
to leave me something blunt.
🕳️🕳️🕳️🕳️
A knowing with no evidence,
a watching with no eye;
the followed and the follower
collapsed into one cry.
🕳️🕳️🕳️🕳️
I shall go on, and it shall come,
or it shall only seem.
The terror and the nothing, twins,
are equally supreme.
🕳️🕳️🕳️🕳️
For what we cannot verify
grows larger than the reckoned.
The unseen thing behind the door
exceeds all that is beckoned.
🕳️🕳️🕳️🕳️
And so, it settles into me,
the dread, the long unease.
The presence that won't show itself
has brought me to my knees.
About the Creator
Tim Carmichael
Let your becoming be louder than your fear, and your smallest steps become the road you once thought impossible to walk. An Appalachian poet and cookbook author my book Beautiful and Brutal Things is on Amazon, Link 👇
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