For most of your life,
you think you're hip
to what you're listening to—
it isn't
the music,
but the silence
that falls at the end
of it all
which inflicts on you
the goosebumps of something
to confront:
that absence
which feels so
audaciously exposed
but which has,
in fact, been adroitly
composed by
the full blast
of all that has
not come to pass—
by the slightness
of every last
moment in your life
when you didn't know
what you could do
or say next
playing back at
full volume,
all at once.
