Hear the 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 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 The 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 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 baby, or the shiver of a spine ... They come ... for us all. ~ 2nd Place ~ in the "Warning" Poetry Contest, Richard Lamoureux, Judge & Sponsor.