Fear Gone Awry

A dark, unyielding,
Of mist and dire fog.
Cloying, omniscient,
Like the haze of a fleshy bonfire.

This is no night, no gentle twilight,
No stars to guide the lost,
No moon for those who despair.
Hope has no business here.

Can you hear the beasts a-hunting?
Shuffling silently, snuffling
Loudly in the dank and the cold.
The heat of bloodlust that makes your skin tingle.

Your feet upon the land,
Clambering over what seems to be dead dust,
Or perhaps the powdered remains of those long dead.
That’s someone’s grandpa you’re stepping on.

Sight is as nothing.
You are blind to all. Your eyes have betrayed you,
They have left you in cowardly flight.
You forget what you look like, after a while.

There is comic relief here, if you can find it.
Though you might just laugh for the sake of it,
If only to drown out the howling wind,
And the constant sound of things that hunt you.

What was all this before the darkness?
Light, warmth and change.
No more. Like some vast war has vanquished all,
Drowned the dream into a well of unknown depth.

Locking the chest of imagining into a cage of nightmare.

A New Age

Of late, there has been a quiet of words
That troubles my soul. A silence,
A stillness. A wall has been built
Between me and the world I once visited.

My eyes are glazed. My vision, skewed.
The haze and fogs that swirled at my feet
Now rise to deceive me. Latching onto me
With tentacles of chill, holding me. Concealing me.

My feet wander in circles, leading me down Godless paths.
The darkness in my heart ventures forth, looming before, after,
Next to me, like some guardian spirit, twisted and corrupted,
A jailor, more so than some benevolent shade.

I feel my strength waver, as Time hacks at it with a rust’d axe.
My limbs shiver with the years, muscles bunching and never releasing.
And yet I still follow the stars. They who gleam at me from above,
Speaking of hope and salvation, of peace and final rest.

And so the silence broken,
The time of reflection is done, the stillness shattered.
The age of quiet solitude,
Is over.

Twilight Dawning

I carry the ashes of Time
In a smooth-dusted urn.
The remains of prose and rhyme,
Blooded victims of a twilight crime.

I sweat blood, and bleed soul.
My fingers ache, ripping, rent.
This winter, this wretched cold,
This hate, my hair, my face. Old.

It feels like a dream I’m waking into.
Labor and toil, something I’m working to.
Like how you’d expect the end of the day to be,
A setting sun you can touch and see.

Unmoving, with this jigsaw discarded.
Shards of glass with someone’s blood on’t.
My mind, in God’s second warning, flooded.
The rain never stops falling into this sea.

Though the lightning may have ceased
To rip a chord through the sky.