Waiting  (Poem 96)

At the dining room table, my makeshift workspace since the dog doesn’t like my going to my basement office and lets me know by leaving “packages” all over the house, I sit hunched over white paper empty except for blue lines and a red margin.  I have wandered down the halls of my mind seeking open doors and any illumination but it stays dark, and the doors stay locked. At the far end the lizard grins, looking more like a raptor than a reptile, its teeth white in the gloom. (Yes, I know lizards don’t have teeth.  Bear with me here.)  I knocked at the portal named rhyme but no one answered; I heard the bolt click at haiku, and I gave up at free verse where words spread themselves out suggesting a found poem that was still lost to me. Outside beneath sun’s heat bloom riotous flowers, reveling in a front yard with no shade, but even the blossoms withhold a place to stick my toe and hang onto something that might grow across the blank space in front of me. The phone buzzes a message but I muzzle it, shutting it down, focusing except for the niggle of need for the reinforcement of a nosh.  The Nothing echoes silence back to me like the small scream.  Still, I close my eyes and wait.