Another villanelle (see Hiatus for my first). This was the one I posted for May’s 12 poems in 12 months challenge at Deadlines for Writers.com
Drat!
They come to me in dreams at night
as scurrying streaks of whiskered greed,
black beady eyeballs gleaming bright
They first appeared in broad daylight.
Beneath the bird table they’d feed
and come to me in dreams at night.
They run, but still I fear their bite
and shudder at their scuttling speed,
and beady eyeballs gleaming bright.
A worm-like tail whips out of sight
when I approach the spilled birdseed
but whisks back in my dreams at night
When gardening there’s no respite
I feel them watching from the weed,
black beady eyeballs gleaming bright.
I fear to find traps occupied
yet bait them still. And still they breed,
and still they come in dreams each night,
black beady eyeballs gleaming bright.
What gives you nightmares?
Writing Wrinkles, and Random Ramblings 
Oh, what a great prose. Of dreams that make us shudder and look.
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Glad you liked it. The nightmare’s all too often a reality when you live alongside a fenland dyke. The trouble is, the little ones look so harmless (and clean) when they first come up to feed, compared to their city cousins that come up from the sewers. Sadly, like mice, they multiply too quickly.
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this poem gives me nightmares… 🙂
well done with the rhyming!
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Thanks but don’t have nightmares.
I have to rhyme. I’m not poetic enough to write blank verse.
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Yes, to me poems should rhyme…
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Your poem reminded me of a daymare caused by my mother telling us about looking into a school toilet and seeing a rat swimming there. I am afraid I still am cautious!
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One place I lived, a a rat got into the house. I still recall my (then) husband in his underpants and wellington boots, weilding a hoe as he waited for it to come out from behid the radiator after I turned the heating up
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Agh!
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