Rainy day walk,
black umbrella dripping,
my every step a cautionary one,
path littered with leaves.
The lawn gnomes
at my periphery stare at me
with dead plaster eyes, keeping
their distance for now.
Weathered angel eyes
follow me with recrimination,
vague, remembered guilt creeping
into my aged mind.
The birdbath in one
weed filled yard seems filled
with blood, sparrows and blue jays
avoiding its sustenance.
My walk progresses,
void of human and animal
contact, my neighbors and their pets
dryly hunkering down within
their casket smug
mobile homes, one peeking out
through curtains as I stiffly
shuffle by, her cataract
blurred eyes mistaking me
for Death, on call rain or shine,
her aged heartbeats amplified in the
dusty silence of her mind.
Nothing is as it seems,
my neighbor’s imaginations fired up
by age and infirmity; the rain
animating their delusions.
About the Author
G. O. Clark’s writing has been published in Asimov’s, Analog, Space & Time, Midnight Under The Big Top, Daily SF, HWA Poetry Showcase VII and many other publications over the last 30 years. He’s the author of 16 poetry collections, the most recent, “Tombstones: Selected Horror Poems”, 2022, Weird House Press. His third fiction collection, “Aliens & Others”, came out in 2021 From Hiraeth Publishing. He won the Asimov’s Readers Award for poetry in 2001, and was Stoker Award finalist in 2011. He’s retired, and lives in Davis, CA. http://goclarkpoet.weebly.com
