The Sound of Ending
There’s a frequency beneath the floorboards that only the dying can hear
It hums like transformers before they explode,
like vertebrae grinding in fear
I woke up with my teeth on the pillow
and something else wearing my face
Staring back from the bathroom mirror with my eyes
but nothing else in place
The walls are breathing in rhythm with a heart that isn’t mine
And the shadows move independent when I kill the power line
I hear the sound of ending, it’s tuning fork precision
The note that splits reality from comfortable collision
They told us we were safe here, they sold us numbered days
But the frequency’s ascending and it’s chewing through the glaze
Can you hear it, the machine beneath the meat
The gears that grind our sanity into something they can eat
This is the sound of ending, the hymn before the fall
When the nightmare breaks its leash and devours us all
My daughter spoke in backwards sentences for seven days last week
Describing futures that already happened in a language corpses speak
She drew pictures of the visitors who stand beside our beds
Counting down in languages composed of screaming instead
The news won’t cover disappearances
when the missing number millions
They just adjust the census and dispatch their bought opinion
But I’ve seen the trucks at midnight hauling cargo wrapped in plastic
Heard the screaming from the warehouses,
seen the smoke turn colors drastic
The sky’s been wrong for months now,
wrong color, wrong texture, wrong weight
Like someone stretched a photograph across the atmosphere
and stapled it in place
Birds don’t fly in formation anymore,
they spiral down like stones
And when you cut them open, there’s machinery in their bones
I found my neighbor in his kitchen, fork halfway to his mouth
Been sitting there for three weeks while his family moved about
Going through their routines around his rotting, rigid form
Like his permanent paralysis was perfectly the norm
The emergency broadcast plays a tone that makes your nose bleed
Instructions in a language that predates the human seed
They’re preparing us for harvest, they’re softening the meat
Teaching us to welcome the extinction that we’ll meet
Last night I watched my hands move without consulting me
They typed coordinates and blueprints I was never meant to see
Schematics for the architecture underneath our towns
The real city sprawling downward where the harvesters wear crowns
Made from vertebrae and fingernails of everyone who knew
The truth about the frequency before it swallowed them too
I hear the sound of ending and it’s singing me to sleep
Promising oblivion while the machinery won’t sleep