A Poem a Day (113): The Grudge

Written for JD Mader's 2minutesgo website – head over there to write, read and comment every weekend...

The Grudge

Again, and again, and again,

This repetition strikes us dumb.

Sensation shifts where it was not,

Where it stalks, singing lullabies

Of the dark, where it talks the talk,

Spinning a web as a spider does.

The wasp keeps its guard up,

This misted time is not for us.

These things fall loosely cluttered,

A word count of naught unchanging.

Laughter lifts where it finds itself

Loitering in a pause,

A semi-colon stumped.

We read of the silencing today,

Where caustic hues come to merge,

Seeping deep into the margins

Washing sprightly across the page.

Jumbled words seek order,

A pattern to emulate a song,

And sung, we remember it always.

Where the Grudge stalks by day,

It will find the pitch secreting in,

Raw dripping walls drawing closer,

Its path narrowing and narrowing.

Jump! It says jump, but this falls flat.

Walls come down when sanity prevails.

This dark-coiled snake eludes itself,

Stealth-like plunging an illusion of teeth,

Ego twitching, forever finding fault;

This delusion confounds us all.

The lost wander through gristle churning,

Vomited forth from the Grudge’s hate,

Thirsting on twisted entrails, gouged without.

Just a stab in the dark, it growls.

This veil reveals and conceals the wolf

As the crowd grows weary in conceit.

They hear the sirens wail,

They hear the walls thunder in.

Copyright Vickie Johnstone, October 26, 2019