I shove my lamplit prayers
through the rests between crowded notes,
Vivaldi’s Spring unraveling into Stravinsky’s,
mocking the metronome on my nightstand.
I snap the cord of my headphones, press my head
to my bedside, kneeling in the void.
But the cruelest joke to an earnest ear
and a flitting mind is the cockroach of tinnitus,
waiting under everything else.
I shovel my fingernails into my palms.
If I could, I would hook a thread in both
my eardrums and fish the static out.
Mid-swing,
I pin the metronome’s pendulum
and force it to join me
in the nights that follow.
That dull ringing lowers its knee also,
scanter and scanter, into staccato,
like rain pattering on Heaven’s roof.
And by my nightstand,
a hymn swells through the drywall.