ManicDDaily

Competing Versions

A man came out of my closet every night.
He was the vacuum cleaner, wearing
my own clothes and some of my mother’s hung
in that closet whose door was broken, so that he could never
be quite shut out, and even when I knew
his shadow well, I always would cry out,
till one day a girl in my class–her name was Glenda, sort of like
the Good Witch, except more beige, told me of the man in her closet
except he had a ten inch knife, and it was only
when she told me that they chased him all the way to a not-super-near
shopping center, and even then, not till years later
that I began to doubt Glenda with her perfect page boy,
realizing how hard it would be
to run that far, and harder still
for her to watch it, the way my guy watched me,
from the dresses still as ghosts,
the vacuum.

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Here’s another belated post for Rommy’s prompt on Real Toads about a childhood bogeyman.  I am trying to catch up a bit on my April (Poetry Month) poems–don’t think I’ll get to 30, but this an extra.  I feel that the better poem I’ve posted today was the previous, Penultimate, so read that before this!  (Yes, I know I’m telling you to late!)  Drawing is mine.  All rights reserved.  

This entry was posted on April 29, 2017 at 9:43 pm and is filed under poetry, Uncategorized. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments.

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