How hope dies in the living

I am a hearing loss away

from understanding you.

I read your lips

with no interest

in comprehension.

It is enough for me to see

that you are talking at me.

Could I be alert

yet in a comma?

I am stricken

with a thicker preoccupation

away from here.

Am I bound up with anxiety

for the way

a next moment may turn?

A dark rain

of unforgettable remarks

could chisel and glisten

into black reflective stone

that I will have to face

over and over

as my say . . .

my script . . .

from my self-imposed

loadstone sentences.

Any words now

make me into an oxen

of recognition’s future blunders.

One word plows into another

across a field of unrelenting guilt

under an unfulfilled

obliging night sky of expectations.

For without these awaiting stars,

there is a kind

of new moon blindness in me.

I cannot joyously share in it

but only indifferently deny it

as important to me.

It is a sad day

of undefined emotional weight

from pulling

this inevitable impending doom

forward through this day.

I am already

a discouraged conversation

ahead of now.

It is all lip sink

relative to real time pain.

When they match,

a coffin of sky

will have a verbal skillet

for a lid!

The acoustics

from my inner voice

are already that process

whispered close

yet somehow vacant,

bouncing off

of a simple backdrop

of flat geometric

casket containment.

Thank god

for dim light

reflected off these walls

comes in many shades

and I have come

to feel for it

as solemn comfort,

though to my view . . .

overstayed.

I have also come to realize

that my dental work of denial

has a timeline

without regard to usage

but just to the death

of my smile.

No matter

Halitosis . . .

even from a last dying breath

always outlasts

a smile anyway.

So ask me now,

but not as a suicide.

Was there ever

an autobiography scripted up

to actual death

to cover that cooling head

that ended it,

with the last breath

and upon it

written the climatic . . .

last line said?

I thought so!

Self-consciousness entrains

to lead

and never would

surrender to follow.

That’s how hope dies

in the living . . .