Crickets and My Own Hum

When it’s quiet I hear crickets and my own hum,

The air itself I can almost feel

filling all the corners,

Dense with emptiness and faintly glowing.

There’s nothing special about the placement of all the things around me, but they are speaking

With their kind of feeling-

Sensations abound when I attend to them,

mostly small pains and clenchings,

the sort of things that suggest something

solid but defective, a used car, rabbit ears

on a box TV, a wet raincoat on the floor

by the back door, a deer mewling

with a misbent leg ….

…and this absence in my chest,

like a party waiting for the guest of honor…

Can it be hard-wired in me to assume

this moment is imperfect and unfinished?

Every single thing around me is resting

in perfect harmony with the whole,

While I try to dig a hole in the fabric of life

to find a better way to be me.