From Our Own Spirits Comes a Minotaur's Success

After House of Leaves

Each corridor did at one time lead to
this small shade of platform where we would sit,
coins in our hands waiting to fall on down forever.

But now the remnants of the house take on
ashen forms, nothing but layers to sift through leaving
black dust on our skin, so that we may slowly disappear.

Into this heart we can dream, but of what?
Of love, where the pairings stutter like a camera's click?
Or of absence, with its drawn curtains closing backwards?

The memories move forward as guttural chants,
a low growl approaching only when we move against it,
when we believe in ourselves toward wrong truths.

In our hands the quarters show that each hallway
points itself to the center; it is a simple series of walls--
the same logic, the same presence through which to exist.

And yet here, in these still, dustless spaces, within
these enclosures of infinity, despite how we stay together,
the cold, haunting echos come back like taps upon walls.

And each echo we find while searching around the abyss,
we discover, remains a form of silence, a contradiction
that is pressed over our open, deformed mouths like a glove.