The Peeps of Lonely Chicks

Dreaming opens doors

Better left unopened

Hallways dark with loneliness

The child inside is scared

I think I’d rather be tired

Then to go back inside there

There’s nothing in particular

No monsters or killers

It’s just the alone

The follows me

And it’s always there

I walk along the corridors

Searching for my mom

She says she’ll always be there

But never seems to be

Yesterday I heard a little chick

Calling for her friends

The call was so familiar

The loss

The fear

I’m alone

I shrugged it off

There was work to be done

I looked back as I passed her

Not knowing that her peeps would haunt me in my dreams

Taking me back down those lonely corridors

Where I was the one alone.

I’m sure she’s resting peacefully

On the pipe that they all share

As I sit here writing this

With memories of despair

The things that come for us in our dreams

Don’t always have teeth

But they bite just the same

I often think of the little ones

That are going through what I did

I cry for them when no one’s home

And dream of ways to help

But when it comes down to it

They’re on their own

I think of the little one whose mommy was shot

The bad man set the house on fire

While she was just a tot

She had no way to run away

The smoke it came for her

I hope she did before the flames reached her

But I’ll never know the truth

It isn’t just the children

There are others too

Arleen had people around her but still she died alone

Drug behind a car so many years ago

They did such bad things to her

But the scariest to me

Was being there alone

Without nobody that cared enough to help.

At night the peeps of lonely chicks

Take me back to hiding under beds

While the bad men try to get at us

I just know that we’ll be dead

Together on that morning

Alone there with my mom

We hid as she comforted me

Trying to keep my crying quiet

She knew that if they heard us

That we too would be dead

Lonely fears of children

aren’t much different then

the lonely times of chicks

the desperate need for someone

to make the alone go away

fear

alone

alone

such a horribly terrifying word