Phantoms

 

For too long, I was asleep.

I awoke at twenty-seven,

on a leafy autumn sidewalk

in the West End, liberated 

from my sham of a marriage

into a whole other season.

The jackals gathered,

sensing my vulnerability.

Was it a hallucination,

those next three years?
They had come to warn me,
but I was not whole enough
to understand.

I am far beyond them now.

The hyenas stopped circling

and howling long decades ago.

The phantoms from those days

no longer visit my dreams.

Instead,
a big black wolf appears,

his eyes looking straight

into my soul. He smiles,

and I awaken, my heart

a vagabond until the day

we meet again.

for Shay's Word List.