Nightmare
       

I am running. The past is in darkness,
a late rain reflecting in the street, the shadow
of a house looming like a ghost carousel.

Yesterday, the air was like velvet, Lenten
purple with a soporific light. But not now. Now
I am asleep and running through my life,

through darkness, running parallel to a wrought-
iron fence. I hear a low cry—a carney barker,
perhaps—calling from the shadowy house

that continues to turn aimlessly in the lees
of someone else's life. This is not my dream.
I am running through the rainy dark

out of my own past. I will not wake up in the
velvet light of this year's Lent. A distant Wurlitzer
cranks out a barcarole from the noir house.

I have never lived here. The street is smoke
and shadow, the light wet and sourceless. I am
running out of my own life into a stranger's dark
present, my lost past ticking like a broken carousel.

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Copyright © 2019 Carol Frith All rights reserved
from Early Echoes
FutureCycle Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission