Five Days Of Poetry — Day 5

Lost In Words

A House Of Words

i am lost in a house of words
the walls cracked with
accidental adjectives
the floor sticky
with leftover transitive verbs
and careless allusions
and i am careful not to trip
on a casual simile
stumble on a pile of
mixed metaphors
or hit my head
on a dangling participle
and fall into a comma

i am lost in a house of words
words of hope and words of despair
words of love and words of my darkest fears
words that form into phrases
and words that fall apart
crumbling into one another
almost by coincidence
words that build bridges
across chasms of uncertainty
and words i don't trust
for fear they will murder
some unsuspecting reader
leave the victim by the back door
decorate the corpse with flowery personifications
and by morning
recreate the living
in the dead

i am lost in a house of words
the burnt sienna or cadmium green
the yellow ochre or raw umber
of bright landscapes
or dark portraits
all the colours of my imagination's palette
mixed into images that spring to life
like summer wild flowers
swaying in the hot procreant breeze
of cross pollination
words washing together in strange sentiments
and cautious conjectures
across the empty page
to remind me of who i am
and who i am not

i am lost in a house of words
words intermingling with one another
and catching both light and shadow
in a perplexing reflection
shining outwards
from a transcendent mirror
words revealing
the bland and blank spaces
of my life
or of your life
words infusing the empty hollows
of every life drifting between birth and death
of every struggling soul
no matter how irreconcilably deluded
with the transforming truth
that opens the door
to discovering the fullest beauty of life
in so many simple words
words that create the art of
poetry