Obligatory comment about how it’s been a while and I’m terribly sorry. Moving on.
I found this poem floating around my computer just now. I’ve no idea how old it is, but it makes me happy every time I read it. Tweaked slightly, here it is!
The Good Shadow
He is the creature who comes in the night
to clean the kitchen and return
that sock you lost in the laundry last week. He is
the hooded figure who slinks by you
in a darkly-lit alleyway with his hood up
when you’re dead drunk at 3 in the morning and
you just know he’s going to mug you or something
but he doesn’t, just
turns a corner and disappears. (He is
going that way to gently chastise
the man who had an entirely different idea. The man
is cowed, cries, gets back
on the road to being clean the next day.)
He is the one who whispers
into your ear in the middle of the night terrible
terrible things
but only so that you turn over
and hold your lover closer, tighter
than you have in months. He
is one of the many who move things around,
puts them where you’re sure you didn’t leave them,
but he alone puts them where they
should have bbeen in the first place.
He sets a floorboard creaking
in the dark; you
deadbolt the door for the rest of the week.
(The next night, somebody considers
breaking in, but chooses easier prey.
You sleep.)
When you turn on the tap and the water’s already hot,
that’s him. When tears fall and the kleenex box
is right there, that’s him. When you
get home that night at 3:30 and your keys are gone and
your roommates didn’t lock the door for once, that’s
actually just dumb luck, he was still busy. But
it could have been him.
He is not your guardian angel. He
is from somewhere else entirely.
He is here
because none of us is perfect. Nobody can
be truly selfless while shining brightly. Good deeds,
real ones,
are done from the shadows.
A soft laugh in the night
and he is gone,
back into the snowstorm
to rescue a housecat who was left outside.
thecrazymagnet 