Denying Sirens

Sirens may lament when we don't consent To lose our will to their woeful, wishful wooing; But if incline our ears, we'll crumble straight to dust. All our space for pleasure, our capacity for joy will be filled to the stretching point, and will fall bagged and limp in a jaded heap. Our curiosity and motivation will melt and slip through our clutching fingers like soaped quicksilver. We'll be forced to live without fuel for interest, move without heart to pump and pull up our muscles to animate our atrophying limbs. Those days they barely do, we'll lumber aimlessly with our senses cemented shut, bashing through the streets like bull or falling boulders, numb and dumb as rock hard carcasses, good as their tomb of dirt. We'll fall into the pit of the yawning gap the siren's song rang full in us like a gong inflating a circus tent, until the persistence of the resonance dissolved the poles that held it up. Like a black hole we'll lose the light of the outside world, and turn inside to empty spaces where our lips, ever sucking, come up dry and dusty, our straining eyes at a loss for any luster. We'll hiss right into nothing, be rust and cobwebs on the doorknob to nowhere, a whisper of "was" with an echo of "never."