ESCAPE ARTIST
- Mar 7
- 1 min read
By Rhian Elizabeth
when i was a child my sleepwalking
was an almost nightly occurrence.
my mother would find me standing on the bottom step
of our garden, a little lost ghost in a nightgown,
paper thin against the elements on those welsh valleys nights.
then there was the time she caught me pissing
in the living room plant pot, the time i toppled books
and shelves and chairs during a rare stay
with my older brother in his fancy windsor apartment,
and i was once rescued by a neighbour
from the middle of the road where i was staring,
just staring,
at nothing in the darkness, all this despite the locks fixed
to my windows and doors –
i was an escape artist in a pair of fluffy pink slippers.
sometimes i will do it now, but not very often, and only
when i am in a strange place, strange
in the sense that the city outside the window is not mine,
the bed is not mine,
and the person next to me is not mine either, not really,
because people never are, are they? and because love
oh love is the strangest of all places,
the place where the sleeping dream
and the dreamers walk