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I heard a
knock upon my door the night before today,
And though I tried to tune it out, it wouldn't go
away,
The knock came once, and then came twice, and then it
carried on,
And then I heard it all night long, until the break
of dawn.
I feared
the thing that would be there, but knew not what it
was,
But still I feared to answer, and I'll tell you why - because,
Because I didn't know the things that it would want
of me,
I wished that it would go away, forever let me
be.
But every
minute, every hour, it knocked upon my door,
And every time the knocking was much louder than
before,
I tried to drown the noise by putting pillows on my
head,
And when I thought the noise had stopped, the bed
would shake instead.
The
knocking and the shaking was much more than I could
bear,
It drove me to distraction and it drove me to
despair,
I prayed and cried and thrashed about, but still it
wouldn't stop,
My strength was at the bottom, but the noise was at
the top.
No longer
could I lie there and endure this awful strain,
The noise was all but deafening and driving me
insane,
I stood there in the middle of the room and bowed my
head,
And listened to the knocking, as I watched my shaking
bed.
And then
before I knew it all the noise had gone away,
My bed had quit its shaking and was quiet where it
lay,
I could have heard a pin drop if it wasn't for my
breath,
I stood there breathing rapidly, like at the point of
death.
I thought
about the time before these torments came my way,
And what it was that I was doing the night of
yesterday,
I soon discovered what had caused the knocking at
my door,
And caused my bed to reel and shake upon my bedroom
floor.
Was my own
guilty conscience for the thing that I had
done,
Instead of facing up to it, I tried instead to
run,
I knew what caused the shaking and the knocking from the
start,
Was just my nerves a-twitching, and the pounding of
my heart.
by David Ronald Bruce Pekrul
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