Tapping
A Poe-m
At first, it came every minute or so,
a slow, heavy sound, that swelled
then exploded, like the tolling of a bell,
but not a fairy bell, or the bell of the Notre Dame,
a strange sound, as if the bell was a heart,
expanding until it burst, then exploding with an echoing puff.
Then it would be silent, as if it was
a beast, hiding in the dark of some other room,
waiting for its time to come, when
it can reach out again, expand,
burst open, and echo like a bullet in a pipe.
I lay in the dark, waiting for the beast
to do this stretching thing again.
To try to ignore the sound, I put on some music,
the bell-like voice of Joan Baez,
singing about her beastly lover’s Diamonds and Rust,
who sang in time with the beast in the other room,
that I imagined being diamond-bright
in the rusty-dark corner, where it hid.
Over time, it seemed to be waking up, quickening
its pace, as if it was the diamonds in Joan Baez song,
racing to quicken the pace of her bell-like voice, to urge her
slightly-slower-than-the-pace-of-the-guitar-vocals
to run with its diamond body in the rusty dark.
The beast seemed to want to be free
before the Diamonds and Rust Joan Baez
described could reach its sad catharsis
and be free again, in the dark silence of the night.
Joan went and Drove Old Dixie Down
as the beast sped up its explosive plopping,
as if wanting to reach out and raid my bedroom,
prayed for God’s Amazing Grace
as I lay there praying the beast would not get free,
and its voice turned into a growling sound
that still echoed like marbles in a pipe.
When Joan’s bell-like voice fell silent,
the beast continued to growl in its
bell-like, echoing voice, and I could feel it
getting free, and feared it would come after me,
right on the other side of the wall,
in the rusty dark of the bathroom.
I groped in the dark for my hunting knife,
and it glowed under the beams of moonlight
that snuck in, between the slats of the drapes.
I stumbled into the bathroom,
my knife held high and threatening,
my heart thumping like a jackhammer.
The moonlight caught a silver thread
hanging from the tap, but the bathroom was empty.
I grabbed the tap and twisted it closed.
The invisible beast fell silent, instantly,
disappearing with the echoes of
the last few drops of water, down the drain.
I dropped my knife on my foot, in shock.
A tiny red bead rose out of the white flesh
of the top of my foot that glowed in the moonlight.
