18

For today’s prompt, write an “it’s too late” poem. Nobody likes a quitter, but sometimes you have to “know when to hold them, know when to fold them…” There are times when it’s just too late, and today is the day to write that poem–before it’s too late, of course.




Evil Spirit

The winds of Hell have sucked back into their caverns.
That cellar door is locked.
There is a bolder rolled over it
and a sea risen around it.

He snatched what he snatched
for this time
and it is too late now

to live in a world that had been
without him
or even to live in a world with him
anymore.

At the end, the neighbors would say,
"There she is!
Get inside!"
But it wasn't She.  It was He.
Wandering the surface of the world
for a time
feeling the edges of form
and the walls of the apartment hallway
and the turning points of the story
(in which there were children)
the life in the shared trembling body
- made impossibly thin -
again, on its little knees
and the defeat of the loving
drink-strangled heart.

Too late to sing.
Too late even to cry.
Too late to write anything after
the barely legible:
"Dear Faithful Friends."

He takes the pen
out of the weakened, determined hand
and calls that - the last word.

The winds suck back.
Water fills the lungs.
The boulder slides into place,
The sea rises.

The spirit retreats
to digest

all sweet promise
and

possibility.