Preface - This is a poem I wrote one night after waking up from a nightmare. It is a deconstruction of the words and images that kept me from going back to sleep.
Au
Spicious
Si
Lence
Au
Spicious
Si
Lence
Au
Spicious
Si
Lence
Auspicious
Silence
The words that keep ringing in my ears
From the nightmare of a night before
From a story that made little sense
But was scary nonetheless
As if dreams make any more sense
But don’t cause panic in quite the same way
As a nightmare does
Auspicious silence
It was the name of a chant
Repeated over and over
As the color of life drained from the strange and harrowing scene
A world turning topsy turvy in technicolor
Just moments from the tendrils of death
Once the chant began
Everything turned black and white and grey
The room stopped moving and filled with mundane marbles of muted grayscale
But what about these two words connected
Spoken in unison over and over
Makes them so scary?
Auspicious:
High honor
Dignified
Glorious
Grand
Silence:
The absence of sound
Nothingness
Quiet
Peace
So what does it mean?
Honorable soundlessness?
Dignified nothingness?
Glorious quiet?
Grand peace?
This phrase has been a puzzle in my mind
Amidst the other chaos surrounding the nightmarish scene
Why was this the phrase that made my heart feel the deepest fear?
Was it because it didn’t make sense?
Was it the sheer audacity of the seemingly demonic superiority
To make me afraid of something so meaningless
And at its core
Not scary at all?
Being chased by a demon-possessed dog seemed a far scarier thing
But the auspicious silence is what continued to rattle my bones
Moments after waking up, unable t return to peaceful sleep
So as I sit in my bed
In what may be this “auspicious silence”
I am remembering the power of words
It is not a word’s inherent meaning that grants it power
But the way it is used
It does not have to make sense in order to achieve its goal
So many common phrases make as little or less sense
To allow words to alter our emotional state so dramatically is quite silly
Words are the vehicle through which we most often express how we are feeling
But both our feelings and the words we use to describe them can be quite deceitful
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