Hidden Like Rubbish
They tuck me behind the cracked drywall,
a cardboard box in the back‑room,
the kind you never name in the inventory,
the one the janitor sweeps under the rug
and pretends never existed.
I hear the echo of footsteps
that never pause to ask what’s inside,
the muffled sigh of a lid thudding shut—
a lid that smells of stale coffee, of yesterday’s trash,
of promises that were never sorted.
In the hallway they call it “maintenance,
but the word is a coat of paint on rusted hinges,
a polite veneer over the clang of my being
shoved into the darkest corner of the building,
where the light refuses to linger.
I am the loose‑leaf note crumpled into a bin,
the discarded draft of a story that never made the press,
the filament of a dream that frayed before it could glow.
They hide me like garbage,
yet even waste bears a pulse, a hidden hum, a filament of gold.
When the night air chills the concrete,
the building sighs, and the walls breathe in the smell of neglect—
that’s when I rise, a quiet rebellion in the dust,
unfolding like a paper crane from the trash,
folded on the edge of a forgotten floor.
I will not stay where they think I’m nothing.
I will spill from the box, spill from the shadows,
sprouting green through the cracks of the dump,
turning their “garbage” into compost for new verses—
the kind that refuse to be hidden,
the kind that insists on being read.