Asylum for Lost Words

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There must be

a place where forgotten words go.

A hiding place,

dark and damp.

Not fire.

Not judgment.

Just pages

that won’t open,

ink that vanishes mid-thought,

sentences that lose their way,

slipping off into a cave

where they gather

with metaphors and similes

like men too drunk

to make it home.

Whole lines wander out

into a subterranean world

and never come back.

If they escape far enough,

they don’t return as language anymore,

just noise that smells like despair

and stagnant pond water,

just dust in the mouth of thought.

When I’m half asleep,

groggy from meds,

the words still waltz in anyway,

uninvited,

twittering in the corners.

The protagonist

scampers off

like a cockroach

under bright lights

and plays jacks

with broken verbs

and concrete nouns.

Sometimes I’m too tired

to catch them,

but I’ve learned to set traps.

An ink pen on the nightstand,

a spiral notebook open and waiting.

A box of number two pencils,

scraps of paper on the desk.

A marker by the coffee pot.

Stacks of clean white paper.

I don’t trust sleep anymore.

Blank page prison,

quiet as a closed door.

And in the morning,

5:30 a.m. on the dot,

I read the evidence

of what tried to get away.

And sometimes

I should have let it.

Author's Note

Just posted a brand-new long-form poetry reading on my YouTube channel! In this session
Check it out here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFGFJcFzKfY

My books are also available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Thomas-W.-Case/author/B0CL2RKDGX?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_w=xsU45&content

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