Asylum for Lost Words

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.