It began as a
drip
drip
drip

A nuisance
but subtle enough to ignore

I set down a few towels
and forgot

Days later I stepped
and sank
a wide circle of soft floor

it grew
unnoticed

Still,
tearing out the source
would cost me
more
so I shut the door

Until it burst.

“at what point, then, should one resist? An arrest [and the rise of tyranny] consists of incidental irrelevancies, of a multitude of things that do not matter, and there seems no point in arguing about any one of them individually…and yet all these incidental irrelevancies taken together implacably constitute arrest [and tyranny]…why did I keep silent? Every man always has handy a dozen glib little reasons why he is right not to sacrifice himself (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn).”