You can leave wires alone, hidden away
and they still get tangled, ******* in knots,
twisted around in angry coils, like a pit-full
of leathery snakes.  Everything appears to work still fine

and it looks nice and shiny, like it always did.
Dusted off every week. Our visitors admire it,
and family don’t notice it anymore.
It’s part of the furniture, there every day;

useful and pleasurable though it is, in its way,
if it broke, it would be replaced. So why,
though untouched in anyway
are the wires in such a state?

So, moving the furniture, you try
and release them. You try and follow the trail,
from where they used to run straight and true,
to where they now entwine and choke

each other with their tiny knotted fists of flex.
And you think this is beyond the laws of physics,
That an inanimate object can come alive
With such malevolence.

You look for explanation, such as
spectral interference or evil black-eyed
midnight fairies with sharp pin-teeth,
who, in glinting moonlight, spin and prance,

Whirling the wires around, as if in some frenzied pagan dance.
Rather, though, (and you know) it’s the small
unseen twists of time that, uncorrected in neglect,
have snared the wires in their own catch net.

However did it come to this? I ask her,
and she looks at me, as if
I shouldn’t be surprised. For so
it happens every time.