Lost Things Wait for You to Find Them but Sometimes They Don't
Inverse Poetry

You’ll find what you have lost
think of when you held it last
my inner sage counsels
retrace your steps
your misplaced charm will dangle
dizzying
in an angle of side-seeping light
with blinding iridescence
like misplaced keys
pimpernels in mischief mode
pinned to the place you left them
like the promises we planted
You can’t remember?
in biodegradable pots
white alliums for our wedding
Lost things
flung from prams by toddlers
like rainbow jellycats
to find lost things
retrace your steps
don’t lose parts of yourself
on the way
to where you need to go
Anchor a thread from now
unravel with intention
I'll follow the advice
I’ll collect heartbeats
in the missing rungs
of the ladder back to you
I’m at the bottom
germinating once again
reaching for an ambivalent sun
Is climbing the answer?
Does hickory crumble under pressure?
the creak of splintered rungs
step after step
could send me tumbling over
rejection’s hollow presence
Your soap lies cracking,
deliquescence lost
from the absence of your skin
I am a misplaced diary
Pages and pages of lost things
fireflies for a hungry dark
where night has lost its stars
Electricity sparks my cheek
flickers in a passing breeze
Your scent flirts with me
in unceasing symbiosis
Did we just share oxygen?
Are you near?
Did you dissolve with the sunlight?
if I retrace my clumsy steps
clinging to Hermes' arm
I know you won't be there
you left with traces of my touch
clinging to your skin
without me.
* * * * *
Now read it from bottom to top. Thank you ☺️
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About the Creator
Teresa Renton
Inhaling life, exhaling stories, poetry, prose, flash or fusions. An imperfect perfectionist who writes and recycles words. I write because I love how it feels to make ink patterns & form words, like pictures, on a page.
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