“. . . terror at night of things generally wrong in the universe.”
--Virginia Woolf
Sometimes
in the middle of the night
awake under a panoply
as caustic as Doré
illustrating Dante
spelunking
to the cave’s center
of unsuppressed terror
asking
will I ever get out of here
alive?
If so, only temporarily of course.
Fear, tap, tap, tapping again and again
like a table leg in a Victorian
séance.
Moonlight over the wrong shoulder,
strangers
waiting in appearing shadows,
bat fear
everywhere in the fecundity of darkness.
Snakes
under my bed
awake
suddenly, hand spilled
over the bedside.
Winter bed sheets’ chill
maybe. Or dinner’s spiced rellenos’
reflux.
Illusions
finally exhaust even magicians:
a life-time of spectacular escapes
until even Harry Houdini
couldn’t
get back.
Ed Higgins' poems and short fiction have appeared in various print and online journals including: Monkeybicycle, Danse Macabre, Ekphrastic Review, and Triggerfish Critical Review, among others. He has a small farm in Yamhill, OR, raising a menagerie of animals—including a rooster named StarTrek.
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