My incense is sending out smoke signals.

The woodpeckers are using Morse Code.

Beneath my tinnitus whispered voices

garble the news in some foreign tongue.

I get the message—retreat—that

hopes and dreams are pure kid stuff,

delusional futures, pointless without one.

Time slips silently out the side door.

Sirens are weeping, but far away.

*

The only answers are inside the shell.

So close the door and go there, go

where no voices dare reach you, where

there is no need for responses, where

peace sleeps in its bed of anonymity,