"...Play On."

Distempered notion, betray and be gone.
I’ll have none.
My hands purple with the decay of non-use,
and other organs swell with fits unbecoming.
No tune should be played yet hands run along keys
and entropy finds pause in a song.

I think we play to stave off the silence in our own souls.
To thrum a chord or press a note, strings and pipes
to stroke and suck
with their gentle curves and bowed backs,
and the way they moan and howl and laugh
and weep—
it is distraction.
It keeps us from knowing
just how solemnly the echoes
settle, a cluttered heap of empty whispers
in the hollowed cathedrals of our hearts.