Ghosts

The old school friend
Gets married in 10 hours.
You lie in white bedsheets,
You feel hit by ghosts;
Smothered by everything that ever
Didn’t pan out, or hurt somehow.

The dark covers you
Like a low, low, ceiling,
It crawls right up towards your nose,
As if you can feel your own breath against it;
As if things will soon get worse,
As if you’ll soon rung out of air,
As if there’s something in this dark to answer
Your wrinkled, wrong, thoughts.

You have a knack for making everything worse,
When every sweet song sounds warped,
Bleached out, like the light and laughter
When a night of drinking or the illusion of it,
Has gone on too long, and until you get it back
Nothing is worth anything and never was anyway.

Four in the morning can be the weight
Of everyone you’ve ever met;
Like the dark, that feels like a force
More sentient, and more malevolent,
Than just absence of daylight.

And the black and white cat’s
Black, swift shadow against the hall
The black shoes, newly shined,
One beside the other beside the kitchen table;
It all feels stretched and morbid ,
And now -- you are desperately afraid
Of nothing at all;
But most of all,
What lives inside your head.