A spider, creeping in the corner of your bathroom?
A car backfiring?
A faucet dripping forever, to infinity?
Wait; what is that sound?
It’s so insistent, so persistent.
…It is the relentless beating of that tell-tale heart?
Your girlfriend/boyfriend, groaning stupidly in their sleep?
The sound of your impending doom?
The ongoing roar of the ocean, fifteen city blocks away?
A cat?
The sound of a needle scratching off a record, but in, like, a negative inverse universe, so that it’s more like the sound of needle being applied to a record, but in inverse, so that it’s the rewind of a record scratching to nothingness?
Does that even make sense?
Water dripping down a cord?
A beetle scratching?
O, is it the sound of that Shakespearean Rag — so elegant, so intelligent?
Children playing at a far-away playground?
The untiring lonesome rattling cough of a dying man?
An engine revving?
If you could put the sound of the sound into words, how would that sound?
Something like this: “sound, mystery — pause — that sound… again.”
A tribal war-cry?
A shout in the street?
The antique ringing of a doorbell?
A yawn, and then an answering yawing?
The even more antique cry of an ice-cream truck, blocks and blocks away?
Or is the sound just an auditory hallucination, the sound of you having been awake for far too many hours?
The sound of a paper-towel-less hands-free hand-drier, you know the kind, the kind with the large square chrome metal button, being turned on in a bathroom?
The sound of time’s wingéd chariot, closely approaching, right behind you?
What is going on?
What is happening?
What is that insistent sound, drumming, thrumming?
The sound of the grass growing?
The sound of a rose petal falling?
A sound so low that if you could understand it, it would be like a wave crashing, and you would expire from the knowledge of the everything on the other side of the nothing that you always think that you never hear?
A cricket?
A rickety lawnmower?
The sound of a rattle, and a grin spread ear to ear?
The sound of lonesome longing weeping, down by the pier?
What, what?
What is it?
The sound of a single tear?
What is that sound, drumming, drumming, like a distant army beginning to array itself for battle — or is it just the sound of your lover’s heart?
A sound, or a murmur, or a nothing?
If you could understand the sound, then you could understand everything now.
Too late; but you could understand it all.
But instead of understanding, you have a lack of understanding.
A lack, which is like the lack produced by the sound of the sound.
