Eternal Victim
By John Grey

 

I make this journey
every moment of my life,
down this dark corridor
and through the last door on the right.

 

This bare floor is known to me.
So are the ever-tightening walls
and that invidious creep of a presence.

 

I am being scrutinized, evaluated.
Something scrapes against me,
whistles through my hair,
whispers threateningly in my right ear…
“Now I have you.”

 

I have forgotten entire years,
especially the ones with the love in them.
My fragility. my vulnerability,
my solitude, cork my memory’s void,
are the schematic for what’s happening now.

 

I am a victim of an endless crime.
Everything else is the perpetrator.

 

John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in Stand, Washington Square Review and Rathalla Review. Latest books, “Covert” “Memory Outside The Head” and “Guest Of Myself” are available through Amazon. Work upcoming in the McNeese Review, Santa Fe Literary Review and Open Ceilings.