The Visitor | Matthew J. Andrews

A poem stops by to pay a visit, and you invite him in,

set out tea and biscuits, sit him down on a couch.

Let us talk of the birds and the trees, you say,

but the poem just sits there, bored, sullen, staring

off into the empty corners of the room. The silence

is awkward. You look at the trees out the window

and take a long relaxing breath while the poem starts

drinking from a flask in his jacket, the bottom straight up,

the whole of him aligned like the handle of a shovel.

Then he’s up and off into the kitchen, rooting through

the cupboards, stuffing handfuls of Goldfish crackers

into his mouth and drinking milk from the carton.

Excuse me, you say meekly, I have things over here.

He responds only with smacking lips, with crumbs

avalanching down his beard, before he is up the stairs,

with sounds of pounding footsteps, drawers opening,

boxes being dumped out onto the floor. Excuse me,

you say, this time a little louder, those are my private

things. You run to the bedroom and find he is a gone,

escaped by jumping through a cavity of busted window,

strange gifts left in his wake: dirty underwear sculpted 

into monuments, glass strewn on the carpet like diamonds, 

a running toilet forming a porcelain Roman fountain,

dark graffiti composed as music along the doorframes. 

Matthew J. Andrews is a private investigator and writer who lives in Modesto, California. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Orange Blossom Review, Funicular Magazine, Red Rock Review, Sojourners, Amethyst Review, Kissing Dynamite, and Deep Wild Journal, among others. He can be contacted at matthewjandrews.com. You can find him on Twitter at @2glassandrews.