RED & HIDING

By Alan C. Smith

There are poems hiding under the clothes

strewn on the floor of my bedroom,

under the open unpaid bills,

caked dead skin in corner sills,

many legged wasp-red creatures with stings.

I tiptoe through in darkness lest I trample them,

get stung, inject with punishing pain, potent poison.

There are poems hidden in my water-heater

closet under the dust bunnies

and petrified roaches on their backs,

crisscrossed legs tight to their abdomens,

poems squirming in the roadkill on the

dead zone of my walk home,

grotesque pretty lil things trying to

vibrate new wet wings the right rhythm

to fly, land in my brain just short of a rhyme,

maybe pupate and live as a song if they don’t die.

But in the savage garden out there

most of them never even make it to ears

let alone forgotten in a book at the bottom

of a chest in a closet where the silverfish

feed and breed

Funny, I’ve never even seen more than one silverfish

at a time; strange solitary insect, the poet inspired.

There are poems hidden in the creations pinned

to my wooden walls, nestled in the images that

release me, poems sleeping in my dreams,

half remembered, awake only in the periphery

of my subconscious mind.

#DarkPoetsClub