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Carpet Crawlers

The garbage chute for our building
has been locked by management
for the summer, says the sign.
Now we have to haul all our garbage
down and out the building.

It’s a real pita every time
you do the cat litter,
having to take it down.
You can’t wait until you have
a full garbage bag to take down,
but you can’t leave it either.
An acrid aroma fills the stairwells
and the elevator as well now.

The story goes, somebody visiting
their elderly parent or grandparent
found rancid and rotted foods
in the cupboards and the fridge.
They cleaned it all out, and threw
garbage bags full down the chute.

I don’t know if those bags landed hard
and burst, sending the maggots flying
or if those things inch real fast,
but apparently the next morning
somebody on first floor saw
carpets acrawl with maggots.

©2023 David Alec Knight All rights reserved.

While in high school in Chatham, Ontario, David Alec Knight and his parents were told by a teacher there that he would be lucky to finish high school, and certainly wouldn’t make it through university. One of David’s English teachers, Bernard Cameron, saw something in his poems though and encouraged him to pursue his writing. He also attended workshops led by the poet, Ted Plantos, when he was writer-in-residence at the Chatham library.

David’s poems have appeared in the recent anthologies, By The Wishing Tree (2021), Poets For Ukraine – Volume 1 (2022), Muse (2022), and Love Lies Bleeding (2022). Recent poems have appeared in Verse Afire, Cajun Mutt Press and The Lothlorien Poetry Journal.

David’s work journeys honestly through darkness before there is any light, so it is well earned and substantial when there is reprieve. He speaks with his own voice, but he acknowledges as inspiration and influence, Edgar Lee Masters, Carl Sandburg, Gregory Corso, Charles Bukowski, Irving Layton, Ted Plantos, E. J. Pratt, and Paul-Marie Lapointe. Margaret Atwood’s Journals of Susanna Moodie and Irving Layton’s A Wild And Peculiar Joy are most reread in his library.

Since graduating from St. Clair College in 2014/15, David has worked in healthcare as a Personal Support Worker. In 2021, he was recipient of The Ted Plantos memorial Award for Poetry. The Heart Is A Hollow Organ, David’s first book, soon followed.

Leper Mosh (Cajun Mutt Press) is David’s second collection of poems. It is dedicated to his high school English teacher, Bernard Cameron (RIP).