Turn Off The Dark

Turn Off The Dark

When you are surrounded by Darkness,

Covered, smothered by the Dark,

It overwhelms-

You can be deafened by Silence,

Crushed by the feel of Nothing;

All you want is for it to go away,

Or to go away yourself.

You cry out for it to go, to fade, to disappear;

But it does not:

 You cannot turn off the Dark.

Darkness is not a Thing,

It has no presence, no substance,

It is (merely) the Absence of a thing.

In the same way, silence is where Sound is not;

Nothing is no Things,

As there is 

blankness in the spaces between the letters and words.

You cannot turn the blankness off,

But you can put something in it.

It does not matter much how much

You do so,

But when you do, it is that that is seen

And remembered.

And, in the same way, that is how to defeat the Dark;

You can never turn it off,

But you can fill it with light.

Even one match, one candle is enough to fight the darkness;

And a flame can spread like wildfire.