No Anthem

Three nights now the window cracked an inch,

and that rope-and-metal sound comes through —

flat, mechanical, without a flinch

of meaning. Just the wind doing what wind will do

to whatever's in its way. I've lived here

two years and never heard the pole next door.

Now it's all I've got. The ceiling. The smear

of streetlight through the curtain. Four

in the morning, the slap and snap

of fabric that has nothing to declare,

no country in its voice, no grief to map,

just cloth gone stiff against the cold air.

I keep waiting for it to resolve.

It doesn't. That's the part I can't dismiss —

it has no interest in what I can't solve,

it just keeps going, senseless, like this,

like this, like this, all the way to gray,

when the light comes back and I can't say

I slept or didn't, only that the sound

was there, and I was lying on the ground

floor of myself, waiting for the day

to start, and it did, it started anyway.