The Poison of Spaces

The poison waits

Content to rest

Behind many layered defence

Of rational thought and

Logics guard

Submerged

Behind the soul

It has no haste, having learnt

The value

Of venoms slow release

It lies and listens

To spoken works

Assuring all and sundry

“I’ve worked it out”

“I’ve seen the light”

I’ve had therapy

I have the remedy

I’ve got it all worked out

I’m healed

Till I’m not

It’s not so much the spoken word

Repeating down through time

It’s the words unsaid,

Empty spaces where words should be

That ricochet into me

Then poison yawns

And toxic contagion

Leisurely uncoils

Seeping under defences

Strangling rational thought

Frozen in helixes of history

The past spirals around me

Embracing and crushing

Suffocating

Reducing

Breathe

The present not the past

Recoil into the current

Embrace this moment

The poison’s past