Cold Room Psalm

The hooks descend like questions from the dark,
each one a small metal moon without a tide.
Below them hangs a silence wearing scales,
a body half in shadow, half in chalk,
as if the night had tried to sketch a figure
and lost its nerve somewhere around the eyes.

The room keeps still the way a witness does.
Black curtains of cold timber hold their breath.
A pallor climbs the flank, a ruined light,
and every barb appears to want a name.
Nothing here pleads. Nothing explains itself.
Even the gleam is careful where it lands.

Yet look—how the torn fins resemble rags,
how ruin takes the posture of white cloth,
how the split throat gathers what little shine
the dark can spare without becoming day.
Not mercy, no. Something harder than that:
the fact of being seen and left to hang.

I think of all that hangs above our lives—
old hungers, iron customs, hidden hands—
and how we learn to turn beneath their pull,
catching the hook-light, brightening by degrees:
not freedom—only a stubbornness of shape,
the last pale seam the dark has not taken.