I found the words I was looking for

tucked away inside the attic,

between the nineteen-twenties bicycle pump

that might one day come in handy

and the vinyls we’d inherited

without anything to play them on.

 

I peeled them from their hiding place,

shook the dust loose

to gain a better look.

Decided to keep them for a rainy day,

and pressed their petals between the pages

of yet another notebook.

 

When the freezer broke

poems of you came flooding free.

I didn’t know

that was where I’d stored them.

Perhaps I’d been trying, much like always,

to keep them from going bad.

 

Sun-baked and burnt,

stories of another world

crawled across the decking like ants

in neat lines of black type,

each bearing the weight

of a word count five times their size.

 

Halfway through the washing

was the character I’d been waiting for.

Curled inside the flannel,

I almost felt guilty for shaking her free

when her elbows clacked against her knees

all limbs and adventures

tangled up as one.

 

One day, I worry,

all the hiding spots will run dry.

There will be no more words to find

no matter how much I may try

and the notepads will have only petals

where once there was ink

and the keyboard will sit silent

where once I could make it sing.

---

I decided to just see where tonight’s prompt took me for the dVerse Poets Pub’s Met The Bar Evening. I haven’t written a proper free write poem where I just spew words in a while so I thought I’d give it a go.