Silence oozes from  white walls like a haunting.
It sleeks around the floor, fills bookcases,
poisoning words as they sleep on unread pages.
This is not the silence of old friends
in which shared experience makes talk spurious.
Nor is it the silence of lovers, echoing
passion and thickened with spent lust.
It is the clean cold, antiseptic - smelling
sterile silence of hopelessness,
it hushes the crowd and binds us each in
the darkness of our inarticulate solitude.