footfalls

beware ... they are coming I hear them as they tap their invariable pulses on my spirit like steel drums in the Cruzan night all at once frightening and irresistibly intoxicating - the warm blanket, doom ... I find it unremarkable that they match my heart's thrumming vying for a truly prominent consideration like echos of a tragedy or the warning of a bell buoy … do you hear the footfalls? do you hear the sound? do you feel the shudder of a furnace in the ground? they bring sight or so you would think … a translated vision, raw to a creator with no eyes - floating, blinking, pulsing for self … for id that bleak landscape screams to be real - to be heard, felt imagined … the barren womb between the stars and abject oblivion - a frontier unreachable, yet standing stark within my grasp bleeding on my blade, precise ... do you hear the footfalls? do you hear them come? do you feel the measure of the darkness that they plumb? approach ... I will know you no hood or shouldered blade to dispatch no gaping pit or sparkling wash of sky no bright tunnel or flame only a timid bite - a nibble on the crimped edges of thought, that perhaps creation is not just the stuff of gods, but for any beast with the twisted acumen or any blind fool with the luck and two shiny pints of amniotic fluid ... do you hear the footfalls? do you know their weight? do you feel the tremble of their auspices and fate? in the hop ... of a toe slipper or the brash stomping of a boot they come for all of us - they come for one singular, inescapable truth in the breath of a newborn the losing of tender innocence or the shiver of a spine they come ... for us all. Copyright © Gregory Richard Barden, February 28, 2020, rewrite March 3, 2024