A Poem a Day (648): NaPoWriMo Day 19 - Haunted

 
Day 19 
 
Prompt: write about someone haunted by something. Then change the word haunt to hunt. 
www.napowrimo.net
 

 
Haunted
 
He paints faces in the stone-dead walls,
this silent loitering without intent,
a shadow bypassing other people.
He hunts all the spaces in between.
 
Bricks sit etched with the blood of life,
a chalk outline washed by rain still stains
the pavement where we walk in line.
Everyone sees it. No one says a word.
 
They talk about the sky or a tree or a song.
She doesn’t like to talk about him at all.
Her work colleagues don’t even know he exists.
She wonders if he has one single regret.
 
Every Sunday, she would have to see him.
Aghast, she’d check her face in her compact,
fix it the way you would fix your lipstick.
And pray he’d behave in front of their child.
 
He always smiles. She hates how he smiles.
So hollow, the way the lips curl back,
his teeth, sharp-edged like graveyard stones.
He is the wolf. A wild, snarling wolf.
 
Sometimes she spots him in the street,
or in the sun-haze of a shop window.
Just one second. And then he’s gone.
Or maybe he was never really there.
 
The hunter and the hunted.
If she closes her eyes, she can wish him away.
Today, she opens them, looks down at the chalk.
It marks the position of her body yesterday.
 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, April 19, 2024