By Ed Higgins
--
Sometimes
in the middle of the night
awake under a panoply
as mordant as Doré
illustrating Dante
spelunking to the dark center
of your best suppressed terror
asking
will I ever get out of here
alive?
If so, only temporarily of course.
Fear, tap, taps again and again
an old séance table leg,
moonlite over a wrong shoulder,
strangers waiting in shadows
all appearing magically
out of so many black hats
fear everywhere
with the fecundity of rabbits,
rats around a grain bin,
under your bed when you were a child.
Now, the chill of winter bedsheets
or dinner’s spiced rellenos
may be causing these thoughts--
but you can’t really know.
Illusions exhaust finally even
magicians
a life-time of spectacular escapes
and Harry Houdini couldn’t get back.
The darkness digested him.
Then, just as the whole of universal darkness
spasms like a sphincter,
or a predator’s jaws closing
on a small antelope’s spine
thank God,
the radio-alarm goes off.
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