Pulse
Pulse was written for a Creative Writing course in April of 2019, when I was in my second year of college.
The idea of this poem was to communicate that "silence is deafening," the absence of a heartbeat growing louder and lourder. A person close to the narrator of the poem is dying, and their growing feeling of grief in represented through the symbol of sound.
I used an increasing tempo between stanzas to create a sense of escalation and stress, and attempted to simulate a heartbeat by using repetition of the word itself.
Themes:
- Death/Loss
- Grief
- Sound
Heartbeat.
A thunderously loud
rhythmic thumping to
the soul-giving pumping,
bloody beat of
life itself.
Heartbeat.
Shockingly dim and
a whimpering in the
empty cavern of a
cavity left cold and
decaying.
Heartbeat.
Quick series of
beeping, backtrack to
weeping that crawls the
halls of stingingly white
mausoleum.
Heartbeat.
Lacking and absent
and pounding at the
roof of a long, wooden
cage.
Heartbeat.
Hammer to the dirt
at the foot of a
desecrated stone tablet.
Heartbeat.
Earth-wide quaking,
battering and shaking at
my bones.
Heartbeat.
Hammering down
to the molten
core.
Heartbeat.
Fracturing of the
crust.
Heartbeat.
Rhythmic
annihilation.
Heartbeat
beat
beat.
Empty cavernand
cavityrefer to the ribcage of the person dying.
The
beepingis referencing the sound of an EKG in a hospital.
The
long, wooden cagein this line is a casket -- meaning the person dying throughout the beginning of the poem has now passed.
Their tombstone.