The Wheredrobe
John W. Sexton
The wheredrobe never returns any clothes.
Strange clothes always face you when you open it.
This is the wheredrobe’s invitation to step inside.
Come and get your own true clothes if you want them.
Or you can wear the strange stale clothes the wheredrobe gives you.
You can go about dressed in fungal spores and live your dull life.
That’s where I came from: from that grey place dressed in your diseases.
I stepped through the wheredrobe for I had no fear.
I stepped through the wheredrobe because I was sick of your thievery.
Where I come from we wear your cancers and live your pointless lives.
And we accept it because we fear the unknown.
But I stepped through the wheredrobe and here I am.
And I want my suit back; the one I put into the wheredrobe early this morning.
The one patterned with the thoughts of thrushes and finches and blackbirds.
And I want my shoes back as well; those bronze shoes that clang a death at every step.
And I want my hat back; the hat covered in a thousand eyes, all of them silver.
I’ll find whoever is wearing them, and I’ll give them this coat of phlegm instead.
If you know who wears my clothes, tell them that you met me on the road.
Tell them that I am coming to take back what is mine.
John W. Sexton lives in the Republic of Ireland and is a Muse pagan. His fifth poetry collection, The Offspring of the Moon, was published by Salmon Poetry in 2013. His sixth collection, Futures Pass, is also forthcoming from the same publisher. In 2007 he was awarded a Patrick and Katherine Kavanagh Fellowship in Poetry. His poems are widely published and some have appeared in Apex, The Edinburgh Review, Eye to the Telescope, The Irish Times, The Pedestal Magazine, Poetry Ireland Review, Rose Red Review, Star*Line and Strange Horizons.