In The Shadows

Abyss Unbroken
by Dawg

Abyss–cold, indifferent, unblinking in its stare,
where silence gnaws and shadows hang heavy in the air.
When gazes lock across that chasm, it’s not surrender you meet–
defiance flickers sharp, a vow that will not retreat.
No trembling at the brink, no bargain struck for peace,
only the stubborn architecture of resolve that will not cease.

Depths unfurl their blackest veils, each layer cruel and stark,
a slow descent through nothingness, through chill that leaves its mark.
Yet iron-forged eyes refuse to flinch, unyielding in the gloom–
the weight of all that’s unforgiving cannot command your doom.
With every inch the darkness presses, every breath it dares to steal,
your stance grows harder, spine grown fierce, will tempered into steel.

The void is vicious, endless–its hunger swallows whole,
digesting hope and memory, stripping down the soul.
But in the wreckage a sliver of light holds on,
an edge that cuts through hunger’s grip, unscathed and moving on.
This is not the tale of surrender, nor of being torn apart,
but of piercing the abyss itself, and refusing to depart.

Darkness sharpens to a blade, its edge a spitting curse,
venom coiled in every word, in every silence worse.
Still, you do not break or yield, nor wither at the touch–
no storm shakes the spine that’s learned not to flinch at much.
Unbowed before the howling void, unbroken in your stand,
you claim each night that presses in, and meet it hand to hand.

Stare into the harshest dark, let its sneer ignite your glare,
for your spirit is a weapon built to thrive inside despair.
The abyss will spit and seethe and press its frozen claim,
but every challenge it throws down, you answer with your name.

Night surrounds, jeers, and taunts–its shadow spreads its wings,
but all its sneering menace cannot unmake the strength you bring.
Light holds fast, undimmed, unspent, beneath your battered skin–
your soul, relentless, holding ground, refusing to give in.
In every echo, every edge, the darkness finds you set–
unyielding, unbroken–its fiercest threat unmet.

Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary, California — The Prison’s Restless Dead
by Dawg

In the chill of San Francisco Bay, on a rock marooned by fate,
Alcatraz stands armored, brooding behind its rusted gate.
Salt wind gnaws the towers, the fog claws at the stone,
centuries of verdicts echo, each cell a world alone.

Shadows unspool at sundown, tracing misery in the yard,
history hardened in mortar, every kindness scarred.
Walk the corridor’s skeleton–cold steel, peeled paint, and dread,
where the living once forgot themselves and the dead refuse to tread.

Iron doors yawn open on the past–no escape, no release,
footsteps clang in the silence, every echo a broken peace.
Ghosts wear uniforms here, some with numbers, some with blame,
they shuffle by invisible, reciting their only name.

You can taste the desolation in the dripping, salt-stained air,
feel the rage of riots trapped, the marrow of despair.
Moonlight spills on gun galleries, whitewashed walls confess
to the bargains made in whispers, to the blood and the regress.

No one dies in comfort–some vanished without trace,
others lingered, punished slowly, dreaming of escape.
In the night, you’ll sense them–hands that never learned to pray,
faces blurred by violence, longing for another day.

Solitude is weaponized–crushing every thread of will,
Alcatraz breeds loneliness, that hunger you can’t kill.
Some nights, a cell door slams–no living hand nearby,
just the echo of resentment, just the spirit’s sigh.
No ghost is ever quiet, no sorrow ever fled–
this rock keeps its prisoners–living, lost, or dead.

Aley Grand Hotel, Lebanon — Check Out
by Dawg

The Aley Grand lingers above the town, a crumbling mirage,
its balconies draped in ivy, facades cracked by decades of sabotage.
Columns still striving for grace beneath layers of dust and regret,
each window a blackened eye socket, watching the world forget.

The shimmer that once lit these rooms with laughter and deals whispered low–
now faded armchairs huddle, threadbare, under chandeliers that glow
with a jaundiced light, flickering over corridors warped by time,
where carpets trap the last warmth of footsteps that crossed the grime.

Past midnight, the ballroom lives in a dance only shadows recall,
phantom women glide, beaded gowns sweeping the length of the hall,
their partners etched by memory alone–gloved hands clutching air–
every swirl and pirouette a plea for someone, anyone, to care.

In the lobby, porters once grinned beneath gold-braided caps,
now they fade in the periphery, chasing eternity’s gaps.
Their faces half-formed, not quite gone, not quite seen,
their laughter haunting the settees, the space in between.

Somewhere, a bell rings–soft, insistent, echoing far too late–
a call for service unanswered, a knock that will never abate.
And in the grand bar, bottles dusted and label-less line the shelves,
poured by hands you’ll never see, for guests who only exist as themselves.

The walls hum with secrets, voices seep from their cracks,
a mother’s lullaby, a child’s giggle, a traitor’s deathbed pacts.
They stain the wallpaper, inhabit every thread,
ghosts as real as the mold on the drapes, the perfume of the dead.

At the spiral staircase, where the banister gleams faint gold,
every step is a ledger of stories, of memories never told.
Outside, Aley rushes by, oblivious and bright,
but within the Grand, each minute is nailed to perpetual night–
check in and out are illusions, time loops in this haunted frame,
a purgatory spun of longing, of guilt, of glamour, of shame.

The Aley Grand endures, a mausoleum dressed as a dream–
a theater for the restless, for every unfinished scheme.
Those who dare wander its chambers after the world’s last shout
are fated to join its company–no one ever truly checks out.

(Pre-Chorus)

I pull the string and you come undone,
I’m the crack under the door,
You can run but you can’t outrun
What you already more.

The hours bleed into the dark, I live inside the hum,
Every stillness holds my shape, I mark the ones who come.
When you sleep I’m in the draft that lifts the blanket at the seam,
Every moment you remember is another piece redeemed.

You hear me when the telephone rings soft at half past three,
I’m the frequency that lingers
where your broken radio can’t free.
And every time you almost speak my name into the empty room,
I pull the string just slightly more,
I watch the fabric start to loom.

I’m not a ghost but something close,
I’m what’s left when you let go,
I’m in the margin of your life,
I’m in the thing you fear to know.
You think you lost me yesterday,
you think I’m somewhere down the line,
But I keep pulling, keep on calling,
and you’re answering every time.

I pull the string and you come undone,
I’m the crack under the door,
You can run but you can’t outrun
What you already more.

The moments fray like old wool, strand by strand they fall away,
I live inside your memory, I haunt you more each passing day.
When you think you’ve finally moved,
when you think you’ve finally healed,
I slip back in uninvited, I’m the wound that won’t congeal.

Every name you almost say, every photograph you hide,
I’m the weight you can’t account for,
I’m the stone you can’t beside.
I didn’t mean to stay this long, I didn’t plan to be so close,
But you keep calling and I answer,
and there’s everything to lose.
When you think you’ve finally won,
when you think you’ve won the fight,
I pull the string just slightly more
and I unravel through the night.

Amityville Horror House, New York — Echo of a Violent Past
by Dawg

In Amityville’s heart, beneath the choked hush of suburban breath,
a gabled house broods over the avenue, glazed with myth and death.
Windows glare like accusations, gaping at every guest,
paint blistered by rumor, foundation weighted with unrest.

Night falls in layers here, each one thicker than before,
every star a bystander, watching violence behind the door.
Porch steps shudder with memory, ivy crawls through cracks in the frame,
inside, the air tastes of iron and blame.

Floors echo the unspeakable, each plank steeped in despair,
walls press in, warped by agony that lingers everywhere.
You can smell old terror–a sour, electric tang,
as if the atmosphere is bruised by every cry and every bang.

Shadows slide along the wainscot, thick with grief and dread,
footsteps from another era circle slowly overhead.
Blood once mapped the stairwell, innocence was forced to flee,
a massacre’s resonance twisted into infamy.

The air congeals with tension, dread pervades each room,
faint voices rise and splinter, then vanish in the gloom.
There’s a hum in the silence, a throb beneath the floor,
the echo of a shotgun, a secret in the drawer.

Amityville, a caution carved in wood and brick and pain,
the ground here’s rich with rumors, every thunderstorm a stain.
Ghosts here are not forgiving, they press in close, unkind,
you leave with your nerves unraveled, a curse sewn in your mind.

The price of what happened lingers–thick, unspent, and true,
in Amityville, the dead remain, waiting to stare right through you.
Each step a reckoning, each sigh another cost,
a house that wears its legend, where the innocent were lost.
Every creak an accusation, every shadow a cast–
this is where history’s violence refuses to be the past.

Annabelle — Watching. Waiting.
by Dawg

In a chamber starved of sunlight, where dust blurs every edge,
Annabelle sits in her coffin of glass–unblinking, relentless,
dredged from history’s darkest margins, stitched lips promising dread,
her painted gaze, lacquered and bright, watches the living, dances with the dead.

The wallpaper peels in apology, each shadow crawling slow,
as if the room itself knows secrets it’s afraid to show.
A ragdoll’s smile sewn crooked, a promise of childhood spoiled,
a terror wrapped in innocence, malignancy perfectly coiled.

Her eyes–lacquered buttons, sinister–reflect all who dare draw near,
shining with something inhuman, some memory too twisted for fear.
No soul escapes her scrutiny; she catalogues each heartbeat’s rush,
predator silent behind glass, hungry for a mind to crush.

She is more than muslin and yarn, more than a collector’s prize,
inside her seams, a heart that never beat–just darkness crystallized.
Old whispers snake from her display: a priest’s warning, a skeptic’s frown,
but all bravado cracks at midnight when the museum’s lights go down.

In the night’s deep hush, dreams sour as she invades–
her small hands grasp at hope, her shadow on the soul cascades.
Some say she moves unseen, a shudder in the still,
others hear a child’s laugh–an echo promising ill will.

Her history–sprawled in newspaper clippings, in the Warrens’ trembling voice,
a tale of haunting, possession, and chaos disguised as a toy.
No prayer can smother her malice, no relic cleanse her stain,
she sits enthroned in glass–incorruptible, insane.

In that room, in that silence, as the night’s heart grows cold,
she is always there–watching, waiting, her story never old.
Her stitched mouth never smiles, her button eyes never close,
a doll with no forgiveness–her legend only grows.
Annabelle remains–a warning stitched in time’s own skin,
watching and waiting, always hungry to begin.

Aokigahara Forest, Japan — Spirits Seeking Peace
by Dawg

Shadows coil beneath ancient cedars, woven in root and grief,
Aokigahara holds its silence–thick, implacable, beyond belief.
Branches knit the sky to ground, locking in the hush,
where sunlight shreds itself on leaves, and every step is crushed.

Moss consumes the stone, and sorrow stains the air,
the weight of hundreds–thousands–lingers, a hush that strips hope bare.
Paths spiral into darkness, choked with secrets, wound too tight,
the forest breathes in centuries, exhaling only night.

Bone and memory gather in hollows, abandoned in a shrine of trees,
uncounted sorrows ferment in shadow, denied all gentle release.
Wind threads through branches, speaking not in comfort,
but in the tongue of loss and longing–stories the living never court.

Signs nailed to trunks plead for reconsideration, words dissolving in rain,
yet the wood absorbs every agony, the rainfall tastes like pain.
The stories here do not belong to the hopeful–
they belong to ghosts who unburdened themselves beneath these boughs.

Plastic ribbons, shoes, and faded scarves, markers for the searchers,
artifacts left by the vanished, the found, and the ones who never returned.
No path runs straight; every clearing is a question,
roots clutch at the ankles of the unwary, and sorrow gives direction.

No wails or shrieks fill the forest–only a quiet, saturating despair,
the echo of hundreds searching for peace, dissolved into the air.
Each year, new grief arrives, a folded note, a ring left on a stone,
yet the forest swallows everything, leaving nothing of its own.

The forest keeps its pact–no names, no release,
only the endless drift of the lost, forever seeking peace.
In roots and needles, in silence and decay,
Aokigahara whispers the truth: some hauntings never go away.

Aphelion

At the farthest point from having her, the orbit swings me wide,
and I am lying in the aphelion with nothing left to hide —
the body tells its truth at three a.m.,
unvarnished, raw, and blunt,
and every truth tonight is just a variation of I want.

The sheets are a topography of restlessness and heat,
kicked and bunched and rearranged around my tangled feet,
and the room is thick with phantom traces of the way she moved
through the doorway hours ago — unhurried, unimproved

by anything but gravity and skin and the voluptuous
arrangement of her body in the light, conspicuous
and devastating — elbow, hip, the turn of ankle, wrist —
and I am lying here compiling everything I’ve missed.

The distance is the cruelty. She’s fifteen minutes east
and sleeping without consequence while I attend the feast
of memory — the rapacious, concupiscent buffet
of every time she’s bent or stretched or simply walked away

and left me with the afterimage burning on the eye,
libidinous and furious and far too wired to try
for sleep, for calm, for anything resembling a truce
with the body’s blunt insistence that there isn’t any use

in pretending this is manageable, that the dark won’t win,
that the febrile three a.m. won’t strip me to the skin
and leave me here, tumescent, in the gravity well of lust,
rehearsing every contour like the faithful and the just

attend their prayers — except my devotion’s horizontal,
sweat-soaked, aching, monumental,
a full-body genuflection to the insatiable pull
of a woman sleeping fifteen minutes east, content and full

of dreams that don’t include the wreckage she has left behind
in this bed, in this body, in this incandescent mind
that will not stop projecting her against the bedroom wall —
the curve, the weight,
the warmth of her — until the morning’s call

drags me, ruined, into light, still orbiting the place
where wanting peaks at aphelion, her body filling space
I cannot close, cannot collapse, cannot accelerate through —
just the languorous, voluptuous, and devastating view

from the farthest point of having, where the wanting is the most,
and I am three a.m.’s most faithful, most devoted host.

Bachelor’s Grove Cemetery, Illinois — Lady in White
by Dawg

Under the wasted eye of the moon, through the knot of tangled trees,
Bachelor’s Grove sinks into memory, surrendering to the freeze.
Overgrown with regret, moss claws at broken stones,
here, the dead don’t sleep–they wait, they grieve, they groan.

Each headstone is a wound, names chewed by lichen and years,
you hear the laughter of the lost mingling with old tears.
Even the wind keeps secrets, muttering through the brambles and brush,
a graveyard for the misplaced, where every hush feels heavy.

Blue orbs flicker in the undergrowth, playing tag with the dusk,
lighting the way for those with nothing left to trust.
Cold settles deep in your marrow, shadows run long,
the living sense the watching, know that something’s wrong.

Then–she appears: the Lady in White, floating in ruin’s embrace,
eyes wide as loss, lips fixed in sorrow’s grace.
Her dress blurs at the hem, trailing fog and the ache of the past,
she moves through the stones, searching for what never lasts.

Whispers wrap around you, tight as funeral lace,
every leaf’s a messenger, every shiver a chase.
Some say she waits for her lover, some say she mourns a child,
others see only a warning–love and vengeance reconciled.

Steps are swallowed by the soil, the air tastes of loam and regret,
Bachelor’s Grove is a ledger for debts no one will forget.
Gravestones lean together, murmuring as friends,
but the Lady walks alone, her heartbreak never ends.

She is more than a ghost–she is longing that never dies,
her path a circle of absence beneath Midwestern skies.
In the hush after midnight, you hear laughter turn to moan,
the living are trespassers, the dead call this home.
Bachelor’s Grove keeps its secrets–buried, blue, and bright,
haunted forever by the legend of the Lady in White.

Bell Witch Cave, Tennessee — The Witch’s Curse
by Dawg

Deep in the Tennessee earth, where the sun forgets to reach,
the Bell Witch Cave yawns open, secrets smothered in speech.
Roots twist like old vendettas, crawling through the limestone’s veins,
every drip is a countdown, every echo’s a witch’s remains.

Step past the mouth–feel that chill chewing through your spine,
history snarling, sharpened on the jawbone of the unkind.
The torchlight limps along the wall, casting doubts as shadows bend,
the cave inhales your courage and refuses to pretend.

Legends bleed through every crack, thick as blackstrap molasses,
the whispers coil around your ankle, tripping memory as it passes.
No sanctuary in these caverns, just the curse the Bells could not outrun,
a thousand threats delivered, a battle never won.

Her name rides the current–spoken by stone, scrawled in the cold,
some say the witch was justice, some say she’s just old.
She’ll tug your sleeve with icy breath, promise you despair,
she’s the reason even silence feels like someone’s always there.

Stalactites drip like warning, counting time you cannot see,
every drop remembers violence, every shadow wants to be free.
You taste the curse in the water, metallic and raw,
the air thickens, folds you in, chills you to the core.

Wind snakes through the passage, whispering oaths and lies,
you lose yourself in looping halls where superstition never dies.
Some swear she calls them by their secrets, drags guilt out by the hair,
others say she’s vengeance, a shadow who’s always there.

You stumble back to daylight changed, nerves frayed and tense,
with the taste of dirt and nightmare, and a new mistrust of sense.
Bell Witch Cave, forever patient, keeps the dead and the damned–
if you come here seeking answers, expect only her hand.

Bellamy Bridge, Florida — Lost Vows
by Dawg

Moss dangles from oak like unraveling veils,
the Panhandle’s heat never quite breaking the fever of old wounds.
Bellamy Bridge arches above dark, slow water–
a weathered spine, warped and splintered, sagging with ancient tunes.

Mist curls off the riverbank, exhaling memories
of vows that could not outlast the flames,
a wedding dress reduced to phosphorescent haze,
trailing beside the boards–each step a ritual, each glance a claim.

The bride’s name, Elizabeth, burns through centuries,
whispered by wind that tastes of marsh and regret.
She perished on her wedding night, her dress ablaze, a love unmet.
Some say her laughter, fragile and startled,
still flickers in the Spanish moss at dawn,
but by midnight, it’s her sorrow that reigns–
white-gowned, drifting, searching for a future forever gone.

Footsteps echo, a rhythm older than the bridge itself,
each board remembers the weight of hope, the collapse of self.
The river below shivers with cold fire,
mirrors a woman crowned in spectral light,
her eyes rimmed with longing, hands clutching the shape of a ringless night.

Each autumn, when fog presses against the pines and the river swells with secrets,
the air thickens with questions:
was it fire, fever, or heartbreak that wrought this endless bequest?
No legend grants her release, no exorcism cuts the thread,
Elizabeth waits for a husband who will never cross,
for a wedding night spent among the dead.

Bellamy Bridge endures, an altar for longing and for loss,
where vows are left unfinished,
and each footfall is shadowed by the one she’s never forgot.
If you walk here at dusk, listen–the wind rehearses her grief.
The river carries her sorrow, mile after haunted mile,
and every night, the bride paces–neither gone, nor reconciled.

Blackout Sun

Morning drags its rusted chain
Across a skull that won’t feel pain
Mirror stares but nothing’s there
Just hollow eyes and borrowed air

Heartbeat steady, soul on mute
Living life in a heavy suit

Chorus
Blackout sun above my head
Burns no warmth, just paints me dead
Walking tall but sinking fast
Future’s gone, I’m stuck in past

Crowds move loud, I move slow
Every laugh an afterglow
Words come out like broken glass
Cutting nothing as they pass

Rage once lived behind my teeth
Now just dust beneath the grief

Chorus
Blackout sun above my head
Burns no warmth, just paints me dead
Walking tall but sinking fast
Future’s gone, I’m stuck in past

No scream left, no fight to wage
Just a body pacing a quiet cage
War inside with no front line
Enemy looks just like mine

Breakdown
Numb. and I can’t feel the fall
Numb. like I’m nothing at all

Final Chorus
Blackout sun above my head
Burns no warmth, just paints me dead
Still I move through ash and air
Waiting to remember care

If there’s a spark beneath this stone
It’s buried deep. and I walk alone.

Blood-Pact
by Dawg

In the marrow of midnight, where breath catches on the edge of dread,
a pact is written not with ink, but with the pulse and copper tang of blood–
a trembling hand encircles an ancient blade, lips pressed to cold iron,
the promise whispered into a silence deeper than any crypt,
syllables slicked with terror, every word a surrender
to what writhes just beyond the fire’s gutter.

Power tempts with a wicked shimmer: the artifact gleams, heavy with curses,
stolen by desperate hands who mistake hunger for destiny–
and in that instant, the soul surrenders,
signing its name on the ledger of the damned.

Corridors twist, draped in shadow, each echo an accusation–
stolen relics pulse with malignant energy, secrets ferment in the walls,
every step draws deeper into the wound,
every heartbeat a drumbeat for the approaching demon.
A hunger gnawing with hidden teeth, laughter coiling in the unseen corners,
fingers brush along doors that will never open,
searching for salvation in bone and dust.

Bound by blood, tethered in iron dread,
the warrior staggers through dreams drenched in brimstone,
the demon’s voice a caress and a knife–promise and threat indistinguishable.
A warrior’s will ignites: rebellion simmering beneath agony,
defiance a light too stubborn to snuff,
fighting not for freedom, but for the right to choose
damnation or redemption on their own terms.

Beneath all triumph, a toll must be paid:
the weight of every secret, every lie,
inscribed on the marrow, a currency of pain
traded for a moment’s illusion of control.

The pact fractures beneath the strain,
shadows recoiling from the blaze of battered will,
demons shriek as contracts tear,
the stolen light blinding in its refusal to surrender.

Alone, the survivor stands, story tattooed in scars
and the black silk of memory,
victory pyrrhic, freedom laced with loss–
every echo of darkness a warning and a scar.

Yet even as shadows fade, their stain lingers:
a silent war raging in marrow and mind,
the ancient bargain a ghost at the threshold,
proof that power never comes without cost.
And in the hollow between each heartbeat,
where the soul weighs what was lost and what remains,
a single, stubborn hope:
that light, once shattered, can burn fiercer than before,
and even the deepest wounds may forge a path through the endless dark.

Bonaventure Cemetery, Georgia — Good and Evil
by Dawg

Beneath the Spanish moss that trails like accusation from the trees,
Bonaventure holds its silence, trembling in the slow night breeze.
Iron gates groan open–welcoming, yet laced with warning’s chill,
pathways tangled in moonlight lead where memory drinks its fill.

Marble angels brood on pillars, faces streaked with time’s own tears,
their blank eyes witness secrets, guilt and mercy through the years.
Stone lambs huddle over children, frozen in perpetual prayer,
while obelisks rise like questions, refusing all despair.

Each statue is a sermon carved in granite, sharp and clear,
their shadows shift with midnight, their verdicts never disappear.
Some faces crack with laughter, some weep for love betrayed,
every grave is a ledger where the price of sin is paid.

Good and evil spiral here, entwined like roots below the sod,
names worn smooth by rainfall, every mourner left to God.
Wander here and listen–there’s a whisper in the leaves,
a chorus of the vanished, a shiver in the eaves.

Cold spots bite the skin, as if regret itself could freeze,
your breath catches in the silence, tangled in the trees.
Sometimes you glimpse a woman, black-dressed and pale,
gliding through the statues, clutching secrets that prevail.

History is heavy here, sticky as the Southern dusk,
smell of jasmine and decay, copper and old musk.
Ghosts parade at midnight, drawn to stories left untold,
whispering of debts and lust, and fortunes bought or sold.

Look close at the angels, at the children carved from stone,
their gaze is endless–measuring each lie you think you own.
This is the garden of good and evil, tangled tight as faith,
where the future’s a rumor, and the past can never wait.

In Bonaventure, every shadow has a place.
You’ll walk away in darkness, never truly gone–
the stories here will find you, long after you move on.

Bonfire Gravity

The beach fire crackles.
The sparks climb.
The waves keep time
like a heartbeat
in the dark behind us.

She sits close.
Closer than the cold requires.
It’s eighty degrees
and she’s pressed against me
like she needs the warmth
and we both know
the warmth she needs
isn’t coming from the flames.

Bonfire gravity —
everything falls toward her,
the light, the heat, the smoke,
every molecule of summer air
bends in her direction
and I’m no different,
just another element
pulled into orbit
around the blaze of her.

She rested her head on my shoulder.
I felt her eyelashes blink
against my neck.
Then her lips — barely,
just enough to register,
just enough to send
a current from my collar
to my toes
and back again
with interest.

The others went home.
One by one the trucks pulled out.
The fire burned lower.
She didn’t move.
I didn’t breathe.

Embers now.
Just the glow.
She pulled back
and looked at me
in the red-orange light
and her eyes held
every wild thing
the summer promises
and seldom delivers —
but tonight she’d deliver,
and the delivery
would leave marks.

Borley Rectory, England — The Nun
by Dawg

In the hollow bones of Borley Rectory, where dust drifts in shrouded layers,
a silence heavy as frost blankets corridors that once echoed with prayers.
The moon slants through fractured glass, painting phantoms on the crumbling stone,
and somewhere between heartbeat and hush, a nun in faded linen wanders alone.

Centuries swirl in the amber air–her habit trailing secrets, footsteps erased by time,
eyes veiled by penance, lips silent but for whispers of unspeakable crime.
She drifts past relics of ruined sanctity, a smudge in the periphery of the living–
her longing tethered to the mortar, her grief as thick as the chill in the eaves unforgiving.

Walls remember–Latin murmurs, a priest’s trembling plea,
illicit love scribed in candle smoke, vows broken beneath the yew tree.
Borley’s grounds swallow every confession, roots gnawing on unshriven guilt,
and the nun, condemned by passion and punishment, roams where her grave was never built.

On windless nights, the scent of old fires taints the plaster and the linen,
fingers of smoke curling through rafters, tracing sins that can never be forgiven.
Doors rattle on their hinges, keys rust in unyielding locks–
in the shadows, phantom bells toll vespers for those eternity mocks.

Once, flames devoured Borley’s bones, licking secrets from the wood,
locals gathered in the moon’s indifference, swearing they saw her where she once stood–
black eyes ablaze in the window, mouth shaping prayers for release,
a figure half-shaped by light, half-drowned in hungers that will never cease.

Some say the nun was bricked alive for love forbidden,
others whisper she waits for the priest who never came, her torment still hidden.
Every fire, every shudder, every unexplained sigh
rekindles the agony of a woman who could never die.

There are houses alive with the ache of history–
Borley stands at the edge, where faith sours into mystery.
A convent’s ghost, a lover’s mistake, a spirit chained in stone,
in these broken halls, dread will always call,
and the nun will always walk alone.

Cancer Spreads Heal My Soul x Matches in the Rain (Saint Jude) (Mashup)

Tick
Tock
Tick
Tock

I’m afraid

[Hey Jude… don’t make it sad…]
[patron of hopeless cases
and of things despaired of… pray for me who am so needy…]

The mirror doesn’t flinch when I peel back the day
It shows what’s stayed too long under borrowed skin
I’ve been living off the change that falls between bad days
Finding grace in small mechanics, borrowed light, bent nails

I count the hours by fluorescent buzz and paperwork
By the way fear learns my name and keeps it
When nothing worked, something still answered the door
Not with thunder or instruction,
just a reason to stay a little more

Every scrape of metal in my mouth tastes like odds
Every promise sounds rented, month to month
You didn’t promise exits or a cleaner sky
You showed up as friction, as a stubborn why

Friends speak of bravery like it’s a light switch
I nod, pocket the word, don’t turn it on
Every time the math said quit, the ground said stand
I don’t know who to thank, so I thank the hand

(Chorus – A x B)
Cancer spreads, quiet and exact
No sirens, no drama, just arithmetic
This is me saying thanks for the quiet saves
For the nights that didn’t win, for the scars that stayed

It takes a little at a time and calls it patience
I stay standing, but the floor keeps moving
I don’t need a name or a frame to believe
Somebody kept a light on when it wasn’t supposed to be

(Verse – soften)
Lower the room, let the noise fall away
Sit with me where the breath is enough
I’m tired of fighting verbs and numbers
I want a sentence that doesn’t bruise

Put your hand where the fear keeps hiding
Not to fix it, just to stay
Some nights the bravest thing I do
Is let the quiet hold me up

(Chorus – Soul)
Heal my soul, not the headlines
Not the scans, not the scores
Heal the part that keeps showing up
When the body asks for more

(Verse – B)
I’ve learned how hope hides in unmarked rooms
In the space between panic and making it through
I’ve learned how mercy doesn’t look polite
It looks like surviving another night

If you’re listening without wanting credit
If you trade in lost causes and never admit it
Then you already know why I’m still here
Gratitude sharp as it is sincere

(Bridge – A x B prayer mix)
If this is a war, it’s fought with calendars
With skin that remembers every insult
If hope is a muscle, let it twitch
If peace is real, let it sit

I don’t need a hero, I need a morning
Where the pain doesn’t clock in early
I’ll take small mercies that don’t announce themselves
I’ll take a night that doesn’t argue

[“I promise to make your name known…”]
[Jude, don’t make it bad… take a sad song and make it better…]

(Climb)
If there’s a god above or the fates below
Some divine power that I’ll never know
Till the time has come and I just let go…
Aim the strength at what’s left of me

(High Chorus – stacked)
Cancer spreads, that’s the truth I carry
Heal my soul, that’s the work I choose
So if there’s a favor left unspent
Let it land where the damage went

Not louder days or borrowed shine
Just steady hands and a little more time
I don’t need heaven, I need this hour
I don’t need saving, I need staying power

(Outro – hush)
I don’t need angels or a finish line
I need time to mean something again
Teach my heart to rest without quitting
Teach my skin it can still be home

Cancer spreads, that’s the truth I carry
Heal my soul, that’s the work I choose
I walk both lines, I don’t pretend otherwise
I stay here, breathing, doing the next right thing

Tick tock
Tick tock
I
I am afraid

If there’s a god above or the fates below
Some divine power that I’ll never know
Till the time has come and I just let go…

Heal me
I’m begging you, heal my
Heal my soul

[Hey Jude… don’t make it sad…]
Keep me… me.

Castle of Good Hope, South Africa — Black Dog
by Dawg

Beneath slate-gray clouds and battlements crowned with moss,
the Castle of Good Hope broods, carved from stone and loss.
Shadow flickers in torchlit corners, echoes in the halls,
where history breathes slow, and every whisper calls.

Footsteps ring hollow across the cobbled court,
spectral soldiers pace, still bound to ancient fort.
Night thickens in passageways, frost upon the sill,
time trapped in mortar, every minute standing still.

In the courtyard’s heart, a black dog drifts–
fur dark as new graves, movement quick as rifts.
Eyes are deep voids–hungry, patient, and old,
you glimpse him in moonlight, but your fingers find only cold.

He circles the fountain, then vanishes in mist,
his presence a question–were you touched or only kissed
by the chill of a century’s unquiet regret,
a warning that the living and the dead have never truly met?

From dungeons where chains rust in long, soundless night,
to the watchtower’s height where lost lanterns light
a parade of the haunted–soldiers, prisoners, the doomed–
all are claimed by memory, their sentences resumed.

The wind brings the weeping of those left behind,
stone absorbs sorrow, records anguish in kind.
Phantom sentries linger–at the gate, at the stair,
their orders unrescinded, their grief hanging in air.

Every night, the dog’s low growl shivers the bone,
a reminder that hope can be lost, not merely postponed.
In the heart of midnight, when silence is most profound,
the black dog passes, paws making no sound.

The Castle of Good Hope–stone, shadow, and dread–
keeps its secrets by moonlight, converses with the dead.
And somewhere, just out of sight, a black dog keeps watch,
guarding what cannot be named, in darkness untouched.

Chateau de Brissac, France — Charlotte’s Haunted Chateau
by Dawg

Deep within the tangled corridors of Chateau de Brissac,
night unspools itself over centuries–silk fraying at the hem of legend.
Charlotte de Breze’s name flickers in the marrow of the stones,
her agony caught in mortar and archways,
a whisper curdling beneath painted ceilings.

Cold seeps from the ground and rises like an omen through candlelit halls.
Charlotte–betrayed, murdered, left to rot
between the promise of nobility and the fury of a lover’s rage–
wanders these rooms in her green dress,
her face a mask of ruin:
eye sockets blackened, jaw split,
an eternal scream pressed between shadow and drapery.

The chateau itself groans beneath the weight of retold violence,
midnight’s bell chimes not for the living
but for the unfinished conversation of ghosts.
Every room bears her mark: a perfume of rosewater gone rancid,
curtains billowing with the memory of arguments
and the sharp scent of blood.

In moonlit silence, she appears: the Lady in Green,
eyes empty and unfathomable,
passing through centuries, her footprints leaving no dust–
only a heavy, aching quiet.
The walls remember each confession, each plea for mercy unanswered,
and still, at every creak of the floorboards,
her story is stitched tighter into the chateau’s skin.

Some nights, her sobs mingle with the wail of the wind,
rattling the ancient panes,
a dirge for justice never served,
a requiem for love turned to poison.

Those who stay too long in the hush after midnight will know her:
a fleeting caress of cold against the skin,
the phantom sound of silk whispering on stone,
a sudden sadness blooming for reasons unnamed.

Chateau de Brissac stands eternal,
a mausoleum of privilege and regret,
and in every shadow, Charlotte waits–
green dress gleaming, face half-remembered,
a love murdered, an injustice never laid to rest,
her sighs unraveling the night, forever haunting the marrow of these walls.

Chateau De Chateaubriant, France — Francoise De Foix
by Dawg

Within the stony heart of Chateaubriant, the night outlasts the day,
beneath ancestral towers, sorrow’s shadow will not stray.
In halls where treachery unfurled, a heart was left to bleed,
whispers slither in candlelight, recounting love’s twisted creed.

Francoise de Foix, her presence carved into every vaulted stone,
the mistress-turned-martyr, silenced within these walls, her agony alone.
History smolders in secret corners where her final breaths were drawn,
no repentance, no forgiveness–just a requiem at dawn.

Once her laughter swept the banquet, now footsteps echo in shame,
a jeweled prisoner adorned in silk, accused without a name.
The Count’s jealousy–a tempest behind every gilded door–
became the noose that tightened nightly, and mercy was no more.

Moonbeams crawl along corridors, illuminate the silent dread,
chill drafts spiral where her spirit circles, restless with the dead.
Crimson stains faded from the rushes, but pain never fled these rooms,
love corrupted by suspicion–abandoned to the gloom.

Portraits line the gallery, each smile masking a lie,
the ghost of Francoise drifts by the hearth, tears long since run dry.
Her sighs swirl with the autumn wind, invade the ancient keep,
a legacy of anguish, a sorrow buried deep.

Stone archways hum with secrets, retell her lover’s doom,
a tale of power and possession, a coffin sealed too soon.
No comfort for the restless here, no absolution gained,
her agony is timeless, by cruelty sustained.

In the marrow of the chateau, betrayal seeds the night,
and when the wind caresses stone, she’s always in plain sight.
No prayer will grant her freedom, nor will sunrise break the spell–
her story lives within these walls, where memory dares to dwell.

Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, Ukraine
by Dawg

Where the border fence sags beneath the weight of silence,
the wind moves slow through tangled weeds and scorched playgrounds,
concrete towers crumble with the patience of centuries,
Pripyat’s heart beats on in dust, in the shiver of wild grass
that claws at broken steps.

No one laughs here–laughter leaked out with the iodine,
replaced by the measured click of Geiger counters,
a lullaby of dread echoing in stairwells and vacant rooms.
Windows stare wide, blind, unblinking,
waiting for a dawn that will not come.

Time is a shutter left open too long–ghosts burned onto every wall,
the swing set creaks for children who will never return,
shoes abandoned mid-run,
dolls’ faces blister and peel on classroom floors,
a silent proof that safety was always a myth.

The first light of morning slides across the Ferris wheel, yellowed and frozen,
each car a reliquary for vanished birthdays.
Apartments still hold toothbrushes in cracked mugs,
photographs stuck to refrigerators,
empty beds made up for families who fled with pockets full of panic and nothing else.

The city’s bones remember the sirens, the voices on the loudspeaker
promising, urging, lying,
and somewhere below the sarcophagus, the core still smolders,
a wound the earth can’t cauterize,
secrets sealed under a shroud of steel and regret.

Hospitals rot from the inside out, iodine stains and broken cots,
stethoscopes hang from hooks as if waiting for hands that will never heal again.
The calendar on the wall is forever unfinished,
books lie open on teacher’s desks, lessons interrupted mid-sentence,
the blackboard’s last equation written by a trembling hand.

Not all the ghosts are seen, not all the wounds are visible.
Night here is never empty–it rings with the footsteps
of those who left everything behind.
Survivors remember the light that blinded–an impossible, monstrous sun–
and the sorrow that swept through kitchens, schools, train stations,
loss written in Ukrainian, in Russian, in the language of silence.

The dead are not loud; they wait in the grass, in the ash,
their names written into every slab of concrete,
every ring of a deserted telephone.
Ghosts of Pripyat dance in the night,
not for vengeance, not for comfort–
only to remind the living what it means to leave.

In Chernobyl’s shadow, every breath is history, every silence is a grave,
and the spirits here do not beg to be seen.
They stand, patient, in the ruined light,
haunting the zone because forgetting is the last disaster left.

The city keeps its secrets, the forest grows wild, and the world moves on–
but Chernobyl will never be empty,
and memory will never be clean.

Defiant Blaze
by Dawg

Amid the graveyard where night’s cold breath prevails,
a warmth flickers–insurgent, taunting marble, taunting bone.
Its laughter leaps the headstones, a misfit flame that never fails,
tracing forbidden paths where the long-dead groan.

Every ember is a scar, an echo, a promise disobeyed,
kindled in the marrow, bold against the frost’s decree–
a beacon where the silence slumbers, unafraid,
lighting the forgotten with heresy, wild and free.

This fire rouses dust and memory, defies decay’s grim hand,
whispers bravery in cryptic tongues, pulses against the stone–
it tells the lost and vanished they are not unplanned,
stirs a mutiny in shadows, chills despair to the bone.

Chill wind taunts, grave-damp and spiteful,
but the flame answers every challenge, roars back every test,
refuses dusk, refuses hush–remains bright and frightful,
turns the stony heart of darkness into a vagrant’s rest.

In the land of permafrost, where numbness claws and weeps,
this fire forges riddles, unravels every lie–
defiant, savage, undeterred, it sprints while the whole world sleeps,
a madman’s spark that dances, will not die.

Each step is arson, every moment a burning theft,
resilience laughs at rot, as embers leap from cold decay–
warming ruined marrow, coaxing courage where nothing’s left,
the blaze a vagrant anthem, turning night to day.

So the tombs become a gathering for misfit heat and wild light,
a challenge to the darkness, a rebellion waged in flame–
where the cold thought it reigned supreme, defiance owns the night,
and even death is forced to marvel, to remember your name.

Defiant Pulse
by Dawg

Beneath the collapse of expectation, where weight bruises bone,
a heart thrums out a challenge–dark, relentless, unbowed.
Despair rises, a black tide, but cannot swallow this stubborn drum;
each beat answers the shadow’s command with raw defiance,
in silence, that pulse is a war cry–unseen, unyielding.

Shadows clutch and clutch again, eager for surrender,
but resolve is a blade sharpened by every failure,
a rhythm that splits apart the cold, slicing through the hush.
The heart does not kneel to the architecture of dread,
it stands, roaring in the night, forging new maps from pain.

Where others falter, a beat insists on return–
a cadence wound tight, refusing to break,
even as darkness surrounds, even as doors clang shut,
this pulse builds a new fortress, stone by stone,
defiant even when the world narrows to breath and bone.

In the deepest night, when silence smothers,
the heart carves out its own refrain–relentless, unafraid,
shattering the grip of cold despair,
making hope from the wreckage of old fear,
its drumbeat a prophecy of survival, of futures not yet claimed.

Deliberate

Every single thing I do is deliberate and is planned,
Every word and every action and the place that I stand,
Has been considered in the cold and in the full,
And deliberate is the word for every conscious pull.

I am the deliberate man in the most complete expression,
Not the reactive and not the impulsive and not the session,
Of the moment and the heat and the immediately spent,
But deliberate is the word for all my cold intent.

Deliberate, the cold and comprehensive and the planned,
Deliberate, the fury with the specific in the hand,
Of the calculated and the patient and the know,
Deliberate is the coldest kind of fury in the low.

Every deliberate action has been preceded by the thought,
Every deliberate expression has been cold
and calculated, brought,
To the moment of the reckoning with everything intact,
And deliberate is the word for the cold and patient act.

The deliberate man knows the value of the chosen time,
The deliberate man knows the value of the deliberate rhyme,
Of action and intention and the calculated end,
And deliberate is the fury and the fury will not bend.

I have been deliberate through the years of the long hold,
I have been deliberate through the patience and the cold,
Of every season of the vigil and the watch and the keep,
And deliberate is the fury and the fury does not sleep.

Demon Murder Trial, Connecticut — Devil Made Me Do It
by Dawg

Under harsh Connecticut light, in the year of 1981,
a young man’s hands bore blood–the courtroom silence had just begun.
Arne Cheyenne Johnson, with sunken eyes, stands accused of slaughter,
a tragedy in Brookfield, a murder for which no mortal could barter.

It began months before, in the white clapboard house on Old Hawley Road,
where the Glatzel family trembled, their son David burdened by a spectral load.
The boy screamed of a shadow with red eyes, foul breath, skin so tight it shone–
an entity scratching his flesh, rattling beds, speaking in guttural tone.

Priests visited, Bibles open, holy water flicked through every room,
but the fear only grew heavier, a garden of dread in endless bloom.
Ed and Lorraine Warren arrived, claiming a demon’s mark–a curse passed down,
a pact, a promise, a darkness that wouldn’t drown.

On that bitter day, Arne’s mind a hive of screams,
he stabbed Alan Bono, his landlord, in a haze of fractured dreams.
No rage in the gesture, only a violence strange and precise–
witnesses claimed he’d spoken in tongues, his eyes lost, his manner cold as ice.

The trial drew a crowd–the first in American history to plead
that a man’s will was overrun, his soul broken, compelled by a demon’s need.
The judge refused the plea, but the lawyers pressed the tale,
paranormal experts filled the stand, while tabloid headlines wailed.

Every detail scrutinized–David’s fits, Arne’s blackouts, the Warrens’ haunted fame,
was it psychosis, religious frenzy, or was something darker to blame?
The verdict came: guilty of manslaughter, ten to twenty years decreed,
but no sentence could scrub the stain, no jailer unbind the creed.

Brookfield will not forget–the old-timers still shake their heads,
the house on Hawley Road still draws those hungry for the dead.
Was it murder, possession, or the unseen turning the wheel?
Even now, the files moulder in silence,
and somewhere, a child wakes from a scream.
Connecticut’s woods remember,
a trial where the devil was summoned,
and men could not draw the line.

Dragsholm Castle, Denmark — The Lady
by Dawg

Perched on mist-clad hilltop where the wind moans through the stone,
Dragsholm’s ancient turrets brood above moss-slick stones.
White Lady drifts the galleries, her veil a narrowing scream,
eyes hollow wells of longing, draining centuries of dream.
She lingers in the oriels, pale silk sweeping the floor,
seeking James Hepburn’s shadow at each oak-carved door.

Grey Lady drapes herself in sorrow’s deepest hue,
her mournful footfalls trace the tower where regrets accrue.
Tattered lace upon her wrist–gift from a love betrayed–
she wanders past the armchairs where their vows were never paid.

Hepburn’s spirit prowls the windlass, cuffed by covenant’s chain,
eyes glinting with rebellion, heart caught in time’s refrain.
No blade can sever history, nor mercy soothe his pain,
his silhouette convulses through each blood-drenched campaign.

In the chapel’s shadowed transept, candles sputter dread,
ash drifts over pews that heard a lover’s final pledge.
The hush is thick with half-spoken curses and broken psalms,
marbled saints turn sorrow’s face to vaults too full of gloom.

Courtyard stones are slick with tears from centuries of rain,
where horses’ hooves once thundered, now stillness rules the plain.
At midnight, bells toll backward, summoning the damned,
wraiths convene beneath the arches, clasping fate in ghastly hands.

Each tragedy unburied: the child who chilled the crib,
the countess flung from ramparts for a whisper meant to fib,
the knight who begged forgiveness in a pool of his own gore,
all drawn to Dragsholm’s hearth, bound to echo evermore.

No exile in daylight–shadows claim the keep by right,
marrying stone to spirit, melding terror into night.
And in the breeze that rattles glass and frays the stony crest,
the Lady and her ghosts unfold their ageless unrest.

Eastern State Penitentiary, Pennsylvania — Ghosts of Broken Men
by Dawg

Past midnight, the walls rise hungry, older than regret,
stones black with confessions the city tries to forget.
Eastern State stands unblinking, a mausoleum for rage,
cells stacked like lost years, bars like lines on a cage.

History bleeds through the mortar, soaked in each scream,
hope packed up and vanished–faith crushed by the machine.
You step through the archway, cold biting through your sleeve,
every corridor whispers “stay,” but even shadows want to leave.

Solitude sharpens in silence, madness bred in dust,
no mercy in the mortar, no god anyone could trust.
In every block, you feel the scratch of men who lost their names,
voices echo, laughter brittle, cursing judges, guards, and chains.

Faint light fractures on the walls, sharp as any knife,
hauntings spin their stories out of ruined, wasted life.
A cell door clicks for no one, a cough shudders down the hall,
you try to ignore the shadows, but the shadows know it all.

Somewhere in the cold, a name is scratched in stone,
a prayer for lost forgiveness, a plea to die alone.
You trace the letters, sense the bite of the nail,
history wears no bandage; every scar tells the tale.

The cellblock air is poison, thick with dust and moan,
despair is its religion; you will worship here alone.
Chains rattle in the vent shafts, unseen fingers brush your skin,
sanity grows brittle, as if cracked from deep within.

Step deeper in the darkness, where the hope bled dry,
see the lines of broken men who learned how not to cry.
Every footstep is a verdict, every echo is a threat,
you are walking with the failures the world won’t let forget.

Men carved out by punishment, whittled down to skin and bone,
every life erased behind a door of steel and stone.
Here, suffering lingers–the voices, the stench, the stains,
a prison built for bodies that would never break their chains.
Eastern State remembers every soul it crushed or kept–
ghosts of broken men are all that’s left.

Echoes and Stones

Don’t dwell on what you’ve been
Let future journeys begin
The path to who you wanna be
Is shaped by all your history

Echoes of your past they call
But don’t let them define your soul
Memories evoke rise and fall
In every wound there’s a goal

The lessons etched in every scar
Guide you like a northern star
Each tale a whisper from afar
Remind who the hell you are

In heart’s chambers sealed and tight
The echoes rage they start to fight
But with every dawn comes light
With those shadows find your might

Every struggle forged in fire
Every stumble makes you higher
Fuck the past and its quagmire
Rise up keep climbing that wire

Echoes of Resolve
by Dawg

Among the ghosts of failures past, resilience learns to breathe–
specters of blunder parade with sharpened claws,
but every scar becomes a step, every stumble a wreath
woven for victory from the jaws
of memory’s grave.

The shamed and the damned
would linger, would feed, would keep the bold in chains.
Yet the stride of the undaunted cuts through where the damned
wail and writhe, and their curses bleed into gains.

Each misstep a stone in the throat of the maze,
yet the path, by its sorrow, is marked and remade–
haunted, yes, but also holy, the pain that conveys
itself into resolve–an unbreakable blade.

Undaunted, facing what masquerades as the end,
the whispers of darkness, the dust on a sleeve–
among ghosts of lost moments, a new will is penned,
a future from fragments, for those who believe.

In corridors grim, where the bleakness looms,
and the air is thick with the threat of defeat–
resolve flares up, a torch that consumes
all that would bury it, rises to meet
the challenge of living, of daring, of hope–
among ghosts, among shadows, stride on and cope.

Echoes of the Btle

I walk through life with a soldier’s stance,
Eyes wide, head high, in a constant dance.
Fireworks crack like a sniper’s call,
I flinch, I falter, but I never fall.
Walls my back in every room,
Restaurants feel like a tactical zoom.
Crowds are a field where shadows play,
I search for dangers that never stray.
Every pop, a cannon’s roar,
Every night, a battle more.
In the silence of my mind,
The war replays, I’m trapped behind.
Dreams are fields of fire and noise,
Haunted by the ghosts of my deployed boys.
Hands that grip a ghostly gun,
The war is over but it’s never done.
Every pop, a cannon’s roar,
Every night, a battle more.
In the silence of my mind,
The war replays, I’m trapped behind.
In this hypervigilant ballet,
I dodge the shadows that swing my way.
Peace is a fight I wage alone,
Turning every stone, the unseen known.
As the world sleeps tight tonight,
I stand guard in the fading light.
Memorizing exits, scanning faces,
Finding war in the quietest places.

Echoes of the Mind
by Dawg

In the skeletal hush where darkness plots,
consciousness unfurls beneath phantom hands–
neural corridors flicker with dread,
mapping a geography of wounds time cannot withstand.

The mind, a winding maze of old betrayals and unspoken names, sits exposed
to the slow, predatory drip of memory,
to the hiss of what was banished but never decomposed.
Nightmares, hooded and relentless, slither beneath the bone and nest in synapse,
their wordless screams vibrating in the marrow, warping every passing lapse.

No daylight reaches here, no comfort of reason or gentle hand;
only the whispered taunt of shadow, only the cold command
of unfinished grief–spectral, insistent, refusing to yield or fade,
etching doubt on the surface of waking hours,
pressing madness into every thought delayed.

Between the ticking of a clock and the tightening grip of midnight’s hold,
phantom voices seed hallucinations,
blurring what is remembered and what is told.
Sanity splinters under the pressure of these revenant guests,
each new vision another trespass, another test.

Ghosts of regret and panic prowl the cortex,
their icy touch electrifies nerves, turns resolve to wrecks.
In every panic, a whisper; in every silence, a scream–
specters gnawing at thought, unraveling hope and dream.
The mind’s defenses erode, and the self slips between–
lost in a maze of haunted recollection, haunted by what has been.

Within the crypt of consciousness, the mind is gutted open by invisible claws,
each secret kept becomes a parasite, gnawing from within,
rewriting every law of reason and refuge.
Darkness gorges itself on doubts that multiply like rot–
thoughts are flayed, not forgotten, and even hope is strangled in its cot.

Somewhere between agony and annihilation, the mind claws for release,
but each wound is a door, each scar a lease
signed in shadow, inked in fright.
Here, in the forever dusk of fractured thought,
every scar tells a story, every echo a battle never fought.
The haunted mind holds vigil, endlessly pursued
by the ghosts it cannot bury,
and the sorrow it cannot elude.

For in the crypt of consciousness, where all true darkness breeds,
every echo is a demon, and every thought–a seed.

Edinburgh Castle, Scotland — Ghostly Marches
by Dawg

Stone above stone, an iron crown carved from centuries of war,
Edinburgh Castle watches, its battlements bleeding folklore.
Mist snakes the esplanade–cold as a promise, sharp as regret,
shadows flicker under the gate, the dead not finished yet.

Night splits on the drawbridge, drums thunder in headless defiance,
ancient phantoms assemble, ghosts locked in spectral alliance.
Under vaults stained with secrets, a bone-pale drummer walks alone,
beating out the memories no living king can own.

Echoes march in cadence, across the hollowed keep,
the drummer’s rhythm, guttural, keeps old traumas from sleep.
Wind howls through the murder holes, voice of the vengeful gone,
ghosts of traitors, prisoners, soldiers–none at peace, not one.

A spectral hound with glowing eyes stalks the battered yard,
its howl tears the dark, the night’s a graveyard charred.
In dungeons and catacombs, past hope and living breath,
brave hearts and broken lie entombed, whispering of death.

Chains rattle on the spiral stair, swords clang in the mist,
bloody banners rot in silence, past glories never kissed.
The chapel murmurs hymns for men who died on fields unseen,
battles carved into the marrow of every haunted queen.

Beneath the castle’s shadow, the air is thick with fear,
cold hands brush your shoulders, something always near.
Some nights, in the torchlight, you’ll catch a fleeting trace–
a drummer missing his head, still searching for his place.

Edinburgh’s ramparts shudder with every retold fight,
phantoms parade through the black Scottish night.
You leave with goosebumps, shivering under Scotland’s moon,
every echo in your ear a warning: you left too soon.
Edinburgh Castle keeps its dead, their tragedies retold,
a fortress, a tomb, a memory–stone, shadow, and cold.

Elegy for Forgotten Dreams
by Dawg

In crypts where lost ambitions softly molder,
dreams curl like paper in a slow, perpetual burn,
their remains pressed beneath a tombstone shoulder,
the hush of regret, a lesson the living never learn.

Here, past’s confessions gather–quiet, unrepentant–
hope’s ancient bones tangled deep in sorrow’s dirt,
yet in the rot, new sinews pulse, relentless, unrelenting,
a tender green emerging from the wounds that hurt.

Each failed ambition–now a relic set in loam–
becomes the secret marrow of a coming spring,
a single sprout determined to reclaim the home
where broken wishes once refused to sing.

Mourn the lights that guttered, yes, but let the shadow pass–
for nothing wasted fails to seed some deeper root,
even the lost, in darkness, leave a hopeful cast,
as petals feed the earth that births their mute, persistent shoot.

Beneath the mossy stones of yesterday’s despair,
unseen roots weave their silent, spectral dance,
mistakes and losses feed the silent air,
sorrow’s alchemy granting every wound another chance.

The forest that now grows is watered by the tears
of every broken dream abandoned to the cold,
in moonlit hush, the past’s lament appears,
a spectral choir, fearless, ancient, bold.

Let the eulogy for hopes expired be not a dirge of dread,
but a recognition of the ground in which new strength is sown–
from crypts of failure, dreams unthread,
and resurrection finds a kingdom of its own.

Endless Pits

The asphalt was a boundary where the planet let me go
I’m flailing in the vacuum where the bitter currents blow
The lawn is just a memory of a lush and plastic peace
I’m seeking out the bottom but I’m finding no release
My fingers claw the oxygen like talons in the dark
I’m falling through the neighborhood without a single spark
The tits of every housewife are a blur of white and pink
I’m watching every swimming pool begin to fade and shrink

I’m a bullet in the cellar and I’m never gonna land
I’m trading in the firmament for nothing in my hand
The pit is just a tunnel made of concrete and of spite
I’m plummeting through morning and I’m falling through the night
There is no fucking floor to catch the weight of my mistake
I’m a ripple in the nothingness that no one’s gonna make

Epitaph of the Silent Echoes
by Dawg

In grave silence, where the ancient stones exhale,
the truth’s gently spun–like thread, like breath, like bone–
whispers cling to air where the daylight fails,
ghost stories woven from sorrow alone.

No cry louder than the sun before it falls,
no courage greater than the quiet of the tomb,
here, in the hush where memory recalls,
strength ripens slowly, banishing the gloom.

In the quiet dark, the stories are spun,
echoes of fortitude, stubborn and unseen–
in this mute cathedral, victories are won
by those who persist where others have been.

Unseen courage, a tale not for show,
unheard resolve in the marrow and the mind–
where the living seldom linger, the lost know
that what’s left unsaid is not left behind.

Epitaph of Unshakable Will
by Dawg

Here lies the shadow, neither vanquished nor bent,
a whisper at midnight, a specter that will not dissolve.
Within every silence where the bold have spent
their strength, it gathers–undaunted, resolved.

Contours of power etched in each clandestine glide,
unyielding in gloom, outlasting the day.
Its presence is carved in the pulse of the tide,
a tattoo of resistance that will not decay.

Amidst whispers of doom and hollowed fears,
it paces the dark, sharp as a blade–
marking the years in the marrow, not tears,
making a legend where failures once weighed.

In shadows, its essence casts a fierce sign,
a rhythm of force undiminished by fate.
Defiant in darkness, refusing decline,
a signature strength that no dread can abate.

For those who wander the shadow’s embrace,
its dance is a beacon, an unyielding grace–
rest now, if you must, while the night makes its claim,
but within these shadows, remember the name.

A legacy inked in a dance with the void,
unshakable, stalwart, impossible to destroy–
for as long as there are shadows, as long as there’s night,
this will is immortal, and darkness its right.

(Final Chorus)

Remember when your hand slipped into mine,
Two fools who thought we’d beat the clock?
We stitched our dreams like patchwork quilts,
Believed they’d never fray or slip.

I held them close through endless nights,
Through wounds that neither of us could hide.
But love don’t always win the war—
Sometimes it just learns to let go.

Goodbye to the dreams that held us tight,
Goodbye to the battles fought through night.
Two worlds, two paths, the wound won’t close,
But every ending lets the dead rest easy.

I keep your shape in rooms you’ve left,
An note ringing in my chest.
All that potential—what was it for?
Some wounds don’t heal no matter how long,
Some roads just split, and that’s the truth.

So take your half, I’ll keep my part,
These broken pieces left in the dark.
And if I miss you in the quiet spaces,
That’s the price we pay for all the wasted years.
One last look at what we almost made,
One last breath before I step into the dark.
The rift won’t mend, the wound won’t close,
But every ending lets the dead rest easy.

Extreme Modern Issues in Society The Factorys Toll

A young girl dreams beyond the smoke, of brighter days that never woke,
Her mother’s eyes, once filled with hope,
now dull beneath the endless scope.
The factory’s din, a constant grind, drowning thoughts of peace of mind,
In every clang, a broken heart, a shattered dream.
The foreman’s shout, a harsh command, the workers move, a weary band,
Their lives entwined with steel and dust,
their dreams eroded by the rust.
they turn their sorrow to silent plight, In every heartbeat,
a desperate cry, seeking hope where none can lie.
A tale of struggle, a story untold, in the factory’s grip,
their souls are sold, where they bend,
they seek a light that never ends.
The clock ticks on, each second slow, her hands move fast, her tears don’t show,
The sweat that drips, the aching bones,
the silent cries, the muffled moans.
As the whistle blows, her shift’s end nears, she wipes away her hidden tears,
Her children’s smiles, a fleeting joy,
in a life that seems a cruel ploy.
weary and bright, in the factory’s harsh light, she faces life, she asks not why, Her body trembling in the glow,
In the factory’s secret night,
37. Extreme Issues Affecting the Poor: The Homeless Shelter
A father’s hands are rough and worn, his spirit broken, dreams forlorn,
His children sleep on makeshift beds,
their future hanging by thin threads.
The shelter’s noise, a constant din, a place where sorrow enters in,
In every face, in every heart, a heavy blow.
The mother’s tears, a silent plea, for a life that once was free,
Her children’s laughter, now a ghost,
in a world that hurts the most.
The shelter’s walls, a prison’s hold, a life that’s fragile,
stories old, In every glance, beyond the shelter’s creaking door.
In the shelter’s darkened night, in the shelter’s grip, The volunteers with hearts so kind,
try to ease the troubled mind, Their smiles,
a beacon in the dark, a flicker, just a fleeting spark.
As dawn approaches, hope seems faint, in the shelter’s harsh constraint,
Her children’s eyes, a fleeting light,
in a world that feels so tight.
in the shelter’s dim light, they face their life, they ask not why,
Their bodies trembling in the glow,
In the shelter’s secret night,38. Addiction: The Needle’s Kiss
In a room of shadows cast, where memories of the past,
A young man sits with eyes so hollow,
a heart that’s led but cannot follow.
The needle’s kiss, a deadly friend, promising an easy end,
In every plunge, a whispered lie, in every high, a silent cry.
He dreams of days before the fall, when life was bright and he stood tall,
But now the darkness wraps him tight,
in the grip of endless night.
The needle’s call, a siren’s song, a place where he feels he belongs,
In every vein, a fleeting peace, in every dose, a false release.
A mother’s tears, a father’s plea, echoes in his memory,
Their faces haunt his every breath,
in the dance with lingering death.
The needle’s bite, a lover’s sting, pulling him into its ring,
In every shot, a fleeting flight, in every hit, a stolen light.
he turns his sorrow to silent plight,
seeking peace where none can lie.
in addiction’s grip, his soul is sold,
where he bends, he seeks a light that never ends.
He fights against the rising tide, but finds no place to safely
I apologize for that oversight. Here are six unique narrative poems inspired by modern romance,
focusing on the struggles
and complexities of contemporary relationships.

Fairmont Banff Springs Hotel, Canada — The Bride And The Bellman
by Dawg

High in the Rockies, beneath firs that pierce the sky’s cold vein,
stands Banff’s stone palace, shrouded in mist and permanent rain.
Inside, the air bends with rumors–stories sharpened on the teeth of wind,
a place where lost love festers and every shadow is thick-skinned.

Red carpet hallways echo with shoes that never quite touch the ground,
glass chandeliers flicker with whispers, crystal tears without sound.
The ballroom, emptied of laughter, glistens with frost and regret,
a thousand memories stuck mid-dance, a bride in a gown still wet.

Her gown is spun from mourning, silk stitched with cold and longing,
each lace-edged step a monument to the vows the dead keep prolonging.
She floats the staircase, hands never reaching for rail or ring,
eyes hungry for what was promised–some happiness, or anything.

The bellman lingers by the lifts, his cap pristine, smile worn thin,
always polite, unseen by the living, always wishing someone would check in.
He glides with a tray of nothing, his gloved hand waving through air,
opening doors for the vanished, never moving from his post or his prayer.

Mirrors in every corridor refuse to play along,
instead reflecting shapes that shouldn’t be there–echoes, faceless and wrong.
The bridal suite glows faintly blue, its air so heavy and dry,
a veil floats near the window where hope was meant to fly.

Under the chandeliers, bellman and bride entwine in a dance,
spinning through the centuries, never giving real life a chance.
He tips his hat with an echo, she gathers the train of her woe,
bound by a silence no priest can break, no bell can overthrow.

Outside, the mountains watch–silent, impassive, immense,
holding secrets in their granite hearts, unmoved by human suspense.
Each midnight, shadows deepen, the veil between worlds grows thin,
bride and bellman still reaching for the living, and each other,
never knowing if the sun will ever let them in.

Fortress of Defiance
by Dawg

Hope is shattered, scattered in the rubble’s grime,
a skeleton of dreams abandoned to the storm–
yet from these remains, piece by piece, in time,
a fortress rises–ragged, resolute, and warm.

Each stone, a memory of pain endured,
each crack, a chronicle of what did not break,
the mortar, made of battles long secured,
the arch, a record of paths none else could take.

Through broken gates and battered walls,
a sovereign domain is wrested from despair,
where once the demons danced in shadowed halls,
now banners of defiance ripple in the air.

Every bruise and scar, a signature of might,
each toppled tower, rebuilt from iron will,
the citadel is forged in the longest night,
its ramparts echo–“rise, persist, and kill.”

This keep is not for hiding, but for standing tall,
each specter, now a watchman on the wall,
the fortress does not shield, it answers every call–
to conquer fear, to claim each fall.

In stone and ash, new glory’s seed is sown,
the ruins of the past made sovereign ground.
So in the deep where broken dreams have flown,
let the fortress stand, its heart carved in stone–
from darkness, hope, from sorrow, strength is grown.

Gentle Dark

Night wraps around us, but it is not the end,
just a softer room to lay our worries down,
We walk out of this call with pockets full of tiny sparks,
Until we meet again, let the dark be gentle,
And let every quiet corner hide one more reason to stay.

The lights go low, the mics go mute, but this is not goodbye,
Just a pause where hearts catch up to what our mouths just said,
If the dark feels heavy later, remember these voices,
You were not alone tonight and you are not alone after.

We close this room, but not the road between us,
Screens dim, hearts don’t,
If the night leans in a little too close,
lean back on what you heard here,
Tomorrow is already walking toward you, one small step at a time.

Ghosts in the Machine
by Dawg

In the stifling clutter of a converted garage,
illuminated only by the jaundiced glow of old desk lamps
and a webwork of power cords snaking across oil-stained concrete,
three sleep-starved minds toiled beneath the hum of something unnatural.

The room pulsed with static–monitors strobing binary like Morse code from hell,
drives whirring, red and green LEDs flickering with a feverish life.
This was not a hacker den of cinematic bravado, but a liminal bunker:
a place where obsession had devoured common sense
and turned hope into a form of ritual.

“We’re not just catching signals,” Mia whispered.
“We’re inviting something in. That’s what this is. An invitation.”

The moment they powered it up, the garage transformed.
The noise was more than static;
it was a choir of overlapping voices,
thousands of fragments bleeding through the airwaves
and into the marrow of their bones.

Night after night, the trio pressed deeper,
driven by a compulsion that blurred into obsession.
Each session left them weaker:
eyes bloodshot, nerves frayed,
sleep invaded by nightmares in which they wandered
corridors of wires and data,
chased by phantom hands reaching through the static.

Faces sometimes appeared in reflections–
in a TV’s darkened glass,
in the polished side of a metal thermos,
in the pupil of a tired eye caught in a mirror at three in the morning.
“They’re following us,” Mia said, voice thready.
“They want out. Or maybe they want in.”

The device’s whispers seeped into their conversations,
voices drifting from the speakers even when the system was unplugged.
They started noticing patterns–
certain spirits returning again and again,
like lost children learning to speak through the grid.

“Let us go,” the screen read.
“You built the door. Now open it.”

“If we unplug it now,” Mia said,
“will it matter? Or are they here, with us, forever?”

Sam stared at the code, a grim smile on his lips.
“Or they’ll keep us company in the dark.
Maybe that’s the price for prying open doors meant to stay shut.”

The lights flickered and dimmed.
The device thrummed like a heartbeat.
Outside, the night pressed up against the windows,
heavy and expectant.
Somewhere in the circuitry, a ghost whispered–
an answer, or a curse, or both.

And the three, wide-eyed and trembling, leaned in–
knowing that what they’d made was more than just a bridge between worlds.
It was a wound in the fabric of reality,
a haunted echo chamber
where every ghost, living or dead,
was now waiting to be heard.

Going Through the Motions Going

Up at the approximate correct time—the clock says something close to right.
Coffee before seven, check the back lock, step into the light
of the morning’s practiced opening sequence, the established run
of tooth and mirror and the choosing of the shirt—the done
and done-again of every morning laid out before me
like the worn path through the field where someone in a story
walked their whole life without asking what was at the end—
I walk it. I’m efficient. I attend.
Going
Going
Going through the motions—going.
The sequence holds without the showing
of the person in the mechanism, the ghost
inside the working—going through the motions, coast
to coast from door to desk to door, the calibrated grace
of someone who has memorized the space
they’re moving through without the need to feel it—
going through the motions. I can steal it.

I’m genuinely good at this—I’ll take that credit without hedging.
The performance is solid, the external edging
of a man who’s present holds up under the casual inspection
of the open office, the hallway, the mid-meeting question
about my thoughts on a thing I’m listening to—
I have thoughts. I deliver them. I do
the thing and then the next thing and then the drive back
and the door again and the evening’s different track

of the same going-through-the-motions—quieter,
less witnessed, the interior running at the quieter
register of the same unfeeling function.
The couch. The screen. The junction
of another day successfully completed and not felt.
The hand I was dealt.
I keep showing up. That’s real. That’s something earned.
Going through the motions. Still. Concerned.
Going

Gold Brook Covered Bridge, Vermont — Emily’s Cries
by Dawg

Beneath the bone-pale timber, where Gold Brook waters churn,
Emily lingers–her hope a wound, her memory a burn.
Paint peels from the trusses, splinters catch the moon’s white gaze,
in the hush between the trees, the past refuses to erase.

Each step on weathered planks reverberates with dread,
carrying the heartbreak of a girl the living think is dead.
Once a promise was whispered, beneath this wooden arch,
a future carved in kisses, now dissolved in loss.

Night sags under her sorrow, the bridge creaks with her ache,
her name sighs in the rafters, an echo no one can fake.
The river knows her secret, and the shadows tell it well–
a love abandoned, hope abandoned, the perfect stage for hell.

Emily’s apparition flickers at the edge of every light,
a veil of bridal longing, lips parted in endless fright.
The air grows thick with sadness, frost sharpens on the breeze,
each traveler feels her mourning cling close around their knees.

The wind plucks the story–her lament is never done,
a song for broken promises, for everything she’s lost and won.
Timber groans beneath the weight of despair that never ends,
Emily counts the footfalls of strangers who might pretend
that heartache is not heavy, that betrayal can be unlearned–
but under this bridge, every lesson must be earned.

Some swear they’ve seen her drifting, a pale glow in the mist,
her dress a shroud of longing, her face a final tryst.
Cross the span with caution–grief stains the boards,
the air is wet with history, with heartbreak’s jagged chords.

Gold Brook Covered Bridge–a tomb for dreams denied,
where Emily walks forever, with no place left to hide.
The past is never buried, the hurt is never done–
underneath this haunted span, the story’s just begun.

Grave Dancer

In the cemetery of lost time,
where passions rise from shadows cast,
lust ain’t no specter in this rhyme,
it’s a force that’s built to last.

No fear in the dark we claim,
embracing drives that burn within.
From the earth, our primal flame,
we rise, igniting life again.

Tombstones murmur secret lore,
of fervent love and fire bright.
In this realm, hearts fail no more,
desires laid bare in the night.

Rust and patina may decay,
yet our blaze will never quell.
We live for each fleeting day,
scaling every epic hill.

In these graves where shadows weep,
we conjure rhythms bold and pure.
From spectral depths, our spirits leap,
our hearts’ true fire, fierce and sure.

Every dance, a darkened rite.
Every beat, a rebel’s call.
In the silence of the night,
we rise and never, ever fall.

So in this sacred, haunted ground,
where echoes of the past still reign,
our spirits’ melodies resound
and live beyond the grave’s domain.

Hangman’s Noose 2025

The noose sways in the breath of the forgotten,
its rope thick with stories, secrets, and silent screams.
A relic of crude justice or cruel indulgence,
it hangs as a sentinel of shadows,
watching as the moon drips silver over the gallows.

Each frayed strand whispers a name long erased,
each knot a curse tied by trembling hands.
It does not discriminate between innocence and sin,
only demands the weight of a body to complete its circle.
The earth beneath it drinks deeply of despair,
marked by restless roots that writhe in silent hunger.

The creak of the wood echoes like a dirge,
a hymn for the condemned,
their final breath stolen by the cold, indifferent air.
The noose asks no questions,
makes no bargains,
it simply tightens with the same indifference
as time drawing its endless loop.

Above, the stars blink like apathetic eyes,
unmoved by the rituals of men.
They’ve seen kingdoms crumble,
heard the whispers of a million prayers
that rise only to dissolve against the edges of eternity.
The noose is not their concern,
nor the struggle of the dangling shadow beneath it.

The scaffold bears witness,
its planks saturated with the weight of countless falls.
The cries, the defiance, the final surrender—
all of it remains trapped in the grain of the wood,
a ghostly choir silenced but never absent.

It is not justice that resides here,
but the fragile arrogance of men
who measure life in loops of twisted rope.
The noose serves them willingly,
a merciless servant to their bloodstained whims.

And yet, in the stillness of the gallows,
there is no glory,
only the relentless march of death’s indifferent gaze.
The noose swings on,
its purpose eternal,
while the world below forgets
the names it once held,
the lives it once severed.

The wind carries its own mockery,
lifting the noose in fleeting mimicry of flight,
a cruel jest against the trapped souls
who sought only escape but found this—
an infinite embrace of the void.

============================================================

Hell Fire Club, Ireland — The Ritual
by Dawg

High on Montpelier Hill where the storm-bent heather grows wild,
the lodge sits crooked, windows staring, the stones defiled.
Blasted by winds that never rest, the threshold guards its sin,
ruined chimney, scorched beams, shadows leaking from within.

Centuries ache in the rotting timbers, blood memory stains the floor,
ravens circle overhead, as if called by rituals from before.
Night falls thick and sudden; the forest recoils from the slope,
every branch twisted, recalling oaths sworn without hope.

Inside, the air smells of singed bone and lamp oil gone sour,
walls whisper in feverish tongues, secrets that curdle and flower.
Candle wax puddles in the groove of a skull carved on the hearth,
footprints track black powder–ash from something torn apart.

A circle of chairs ringed in salt, bottles stacked in precarious towers,
smoke coiling in prayer–summoning whatever devours.
The ritual begins with a shriek, laughter spiraling into a moan,
wine is poured, fire spatters, and every man stands alone.

The club’s cruel hosts chant, their words igniting the air,
calling for devils and demons, daring God to be there.
Monstrous shadows leap across faces, flaying reason and doubt,
old rites resurrected, black eyes rolling, twisted mouths shout.

Wind pounds the broken windowpanes, glass shivers in the frame,
candles sputter, painting the ceiling with the echo of every name.
Rain seeps through the rafters, mingling with blood on stone,
every drop is a warning–no one truly leaves alone.

The lodge stands empty at daybreak, the ritual long spent,
yet echoes of what happened remain–scarred timbers, air rent.
Some say the Devil was summoned, some say only men to blame,
but on Montpelier Hill, after midnight, the dark remembers every name.

Hodgson Family, Enfield, England — Shadows Hide
by Dawg

Under the sullen English dusk, the house turns cold and mean,
Hodgson’s modest living room, once tranquil, now obscene.
Night seeps through every windowpane, devours each ounce of light,
furnishings rise in silent protest, trembling at unseen might.

A mother stands with children pressed tight to her chest,
as drawers slam open, cupboards empty, peace denied its rest.
The floorboards creak without a step, wallpaper buckles in shame,
every ordinary object here is twisted in a ghost’s cruel game.

Whispers fracture sanity, a growl in a child’s throat–
Janet’s voice split double, a guttural, unholy note.
She’s speaking in the dark for someone who cannot be seen,
words bruised by something ancient, violent, and unclean.

No priest’s cross, no skeptical scorn can banish what’s inside;
it turns the bedsheets ice-cold and will not be denied.
Through endless hours, shadows slither, spinning fear through every room,
daylight flickers feebly, outnumbered by the gloom.

Weeks bleed into months, hope battered and thin,
every laughter drowned out, faith silenced within.
Even when the worst subsides and the poltergeist withdraws,
its legacy is carved in silence, its memory is law.

The air never quite clears, the temperature never warms;
each creak, each shadow, each fleeting form–
a reminder the house was marked, that sanity paid a price,
that the invisible hands of the dead roll the living like dice.

In Enfield’s haunted quarter, legends breed in whispered tones–
where spirits have a talent for rearranging homes,
and the terror that began in shadows still hides in every wall,
the Hodgson house remembers, and the dark recalls it all.

Hoia Baciu Forest, Romania — Bermuda Triangle of Romania
by Dawg

Night pools in hollows of crooked beech, where twisted trunks abide,
moss knots itself like rumor, sealing pathways from inside.
Strange light flares–cold phosphorus floating just beyond the hand,
a silent oracle pulsing in a circle of scorched sand.

Owls refuse these branches, the air too charged, unstill,
crackling on bark, every needle tinged with chill.
Distance warps and doubles–three steps become a mile,
compass needles pirouette, iron shivers, grids defile.

Voices long departed coil within the tangle,
consonants break mid-word, vowels distort and mangle.
Time, an injured pendulum, stutters against the trees,
moments fall like broken glass, refracting histories.

A shepherd vanished decades past–the grass recalls the weight,
footprints darken after rain then bleach and dissipate.
His lantern sometimes flickers where the clearing spreads a scar,
a hesitant, uneven glow–half memory, half star.

Silver globes ascend at dusk, silent as unwept tears,
orbiting above the stump-rings of dislocated years.
Sensors fail without warning, film devours its frame,
batteries bleed in darkness, circuitry wilts in flame.

Only the forest records each pulse beneath the bark,
a ledger inked by silence, luminous in dark.
Wanderer or dreamer, scholar or runaway,
all must negotiate branches that barter light away.

Hoia Baciu endures–no verdict, no decree,
a geometry of riddles stitched into each tree.
The forest breathes in riddles, exhales electric mist,
where logic loses meaning and reality is kissed.

Houska Castle, Czech Republic — Gateway To Hell
by Dawg

Crowned by forests black as spilled ink, the ancient Houska stands,
stone fortress raised to seal a wound, not made by mortal hands.
Walls mortared not for shelter, but to cage what lies beneath–
a rift in earth’s intentions, where nothing living dares to breathe.

Above the haunted pit, masons laid the first bleak stone,
in defiance of a mouth that opens into the bone.
Centuries drip like candle wax along the parapets and stairs,
a castle built for monsters, not for kings nor heirs.

Beneath the flagstones, legend claims the darkness swells,
a gateway cut by nature’s spite–a passage straight to hell.
Demons writhe in shadow, half-glimpsed in the mind’s back room,
screaming through the keyholes, whispering promises of doom.

Prisoners once lowered by rope, left to test the abyss,
returned in madness, eyes forever marked by what they missed.
No prayers survive in crypts this cold, no blessings penetrate the deep,
only the echo of claw and fang, when even the stone can’t sleep.

Torches flicker on wet limestone, light surrendering to dread,
air thick as unspoken confessions, chilled by the ancient dead.
Iron gates groan, grating against the weight of centuries’ fear,
windows frame the blackest hour, and nothing bright draws near.

Rain gnaws the gargoyles, moss devours the stairs,
Houska sits–immovable, gaunt, forever unprepared.
The wind sighs at the windows, never daring to slip inside,
as if even the elements fear what these ancient stones confide.

Not a sanctuary, not a throne–merely a lid pressed tight
over something earth itself rejected in primal, silent fright.
Within these ramparts, hell’s heartbeat hammers slow and deep,
for Houska was not meant for life, but to guard the restless dead.
Time crawls through the cellars, history eats itself raw–
Houska: the mouth of nightmares, the world’s unending flaw.

Hurricane Lamp

The power went out on the coast and she found the hurricane lamp,
the glass chimney smoked with the damp
of a closet that has not been opened in a year,
and she lit it with a kitchen match and I could hear
the wick catch like a small held breath
and the room went gold and the depth
of shadow on her face was the oldest kind of light,
the light that people wanted by before the electric night.

Hurricane lamp, the golden circle on the wall,
her shadow twice as tall
as the woman casting it, and I am in the dark
outside the light, a man watching a spark
become a woman become the warmest thing in the room,
hurricane lamp against the gloom,
and I have never wanted anyone the way I want
the woman in the lamplight and the slow gold haunt.

She set it on the table and sat cross-legged on the floor,
the flame between us like a door
that was open but guarded by the heat,
and the shadows made her features move and the beat
of the flame made her pulse visible at her throat,
the most beautiful woman in the most remote
corner of the blackout, and the wanting was so old
it felt like something settlers told
each other on the prairie when the lantern was the only bride
between the man and the long dark outside.

The storm hit hard an hour in and the windows shook with rain,
and she moved the lamp between us and the pain
of wanting was replaced by something closer, something lit
from underneath — she smiled and the wick spit
and the shadows danced and the room was very small
and the hurricane outside meant nothing at all
compared to the hurricane inside my chest,
the lamplight and the woman and the rest
of my life rewritten by a flame in a glass,
the hurricane lamp, the wanting,
and the hour that would not pass.

(Hush now, dont despair,

Hush Now, Don’t Despair

Hush now, don’t despair
Let fear take its grip
Ten sixths, ten shillings, sixpence spent
Trace back my unmarred face

The night wraps cold arms around
Softly, don’t fight sleep
Let darkness hold you down
I’ll keep vigil while you weep
Until the dark recedes from sight

I’ve counted every loss I’ve earned
Each sixth, each shilling, every turn
The ledger marks the body’s cost
Washes clean when light is lost
Unmarred, untouched under the tide
I purify in morning’s light

I’ll hold you through the long night through
Hum what our mothers used to sing
Sixpence to buy back what was mine
Before the world took everything

We fall apart but still we mend
And live to lose it all again
Unmarred, untouched, we breathe, we rise
We fall apart before sunrise

I Hear the Next Step
by Dawg

My brain manufactures catastrophe from silence in the room,
every quiet moment breeds scenarios of impending doom.
The phone that doesn’t ring means someone’s died or left for good,
and peace is just the prelude to the chaos that it should.

I read disaster in the way she hesitates before she speaks,
decode apocalypse from simple pauses that last weeks.
Inside my skull where normal people store their basic calm,
I’ve built an arsenal of panic primed to detonate like bombs.

I hear the next step coming down the hall,
the one that brings the ruin and destroys it all.
My mind’s a fucking prophet of the worst that hasn’t been,
turning every silence into where the screaming will begin.

The doctor says I’m healthy but I’ve catalogued the signs
of seventeen diseases lurking dormant in my spine.
And when she smiles at me I’m calculating when she’ll leave,
what betrayal she’s rehearsing up her sleeve.

I map escape routes from every building that I’m in,
prepare for fires floods and wars that haven’t yet begun.
My neighbors think I’m paranoid and maybe that’s correct,
but I’ll be ready when the shoe drops and they’re fucking wrecked.

Happiness is just a trap for people who don’t see
the landmines planted everywhere that wait for you and me.
I’ve studied every angle every way this falls apart
and memorized the pain before it even gets to start.

They tell me live the moment let the future find its way,
but futures always find you and they never come to play.
They come to take their payment for the crime of feeling safe,
for thinking you could breathe without the world around you caving in.

Every dawn arrives like evidence I somehow overlooked,
that yesterday’s survival was a clerical mistake in books
the universe keeps trying to correct with fresh disasters,
aimed precisely where I’m standing, breathing faster and faster.

(Last line, whispered, sinister)

I’ll return

You think you won when you walked out the door
You think your silence ended this war
Every word you threw, every laugh you spent
I’m counting them all, I’m counting on you

I wore my wounds like medals on my chest
Every compromise left me less and less
You thought you’d break me, thought I’d bend
But broken things don’t break clean, they just mend

I’m the shape in your doorway
I’m the knife you didn’t see
I’m the nightmare waking you up
I’m the one you thought was through

I’ll return
Like a curse you thought you’d buried
Like a shadow where you sleep
I’m the knife you didn’t see

I am a wizard, you know
(Laughter)
I found the nerve to take your best shot
You swung so hard you missed the plot
Every little victory you claimed
Just fed the hunger of the flames

I’m the shape in your doorway
I’m the knife you didn’t see
I’m the nightmare waking you up
I’m the one you thought was through

(Laughter grows, then fades)

(In the mirrors stark chill,

In the Mirror’s Stark Chill

Frost climbs the glass where your face used to be,
Empty and spectral, no hand reaching me,
I’ve memorized every crack in that wall,
The reflection keeps staring but can’t hold me anymore.

They say we’re bound by a curse and a name,
Two souls so tangled they burn when they break,
But I felt the line snap clean through the air,
Now I’m walking away and I’m walking alone.

Chorus:
In the mirror’s stark chill I was dying a slow death,
You stood behind me but you couldn’t take my breath,
Now the frost on the glass is my air,
I broke the mirror and I’m finally, finally here.

Dawn cuts the room like a blade through silk,
Your shadow dissolved when I learned how to wilt,
In the shards I saw clearly what I’d refused to see—
You were the cage and you were the key.

Now the light floods the floor where your memory bleeds,
I’m not who you made me, I’m not what you need,
The cold in my bones is the sweetest release,
You can’t touch what you never could seize.

In The Shadows
by Dawg

The Bridge and the Voice

There’s a kind of boredom that doesn’t just dull you–
it gnaws, hollowing out your insides
with the slow, methodical patience of rot.
That’s where we were, Jon and me,
stuck somewhere between middle-age denial
and the shadow of wasted youth.

Neither of us believed in ghosts, not really,
but you start to crave any excuse to feel something sharp.
Ghost hunting wasn’t a calling or a crusade.
It was a raised middle finger at everything safe and numb.

That bridge, out past the county line
where cell service died and the woods thickened,
had a gravity you could feel pulling at you the closer you got,
like the trees leaning in were old judges, watching, waiting.

We parked, got out, and the air hit us–
cool, thick, carrying the scent of mud and dead leaves.
The river below moved slow, never loud but always present,
like it was listening.

When I finally spoke–“Did you hear that?”–
it was less a question, more a lifeline.

It wasn’t until later, with the windows up
and the car heater rattling,
that we played the audio back.
There, buried in the noise, was my voice–
thin, strained.
And then, clear as sunrise–
a child’s voice. Unmistakable.
“I heard that too.”
Just five words, but they hung in the car like a noose.

For weeks, that voice haunted the edges of sleep.
That’s the thing about an experience like that–
you don’t get to go back to the way things were.

Chasing Orbs and Shadows

The bridge wasn’t an ending,
just the opening shot that splintered our easy disbelief.
We were infected with curiosity,
the kind that won’t let you sleep.

But it wasn’t just ghosts we found in those rooms.
There’s a kind of honesty that creeps in with the dark,
a permission to drop every mask
and speak from the ache that hides under the skin.
We talked about the things that haunted us,
not spirits, but memories–
fucked-up childhoods, mistakes, losses,
the things we never fixed.

The truth is, we became addicted–
not to the scares, but to the clarity that came after.
Every shadow was a story.
Every room held a piece of someone’s pain.

Belief Beyond the Shadows

That feeling pulled us further,
right up to the battlefield,
ground heavy with loss,
history grinding beneath the grass.

We listened–
not just for voices,
but for anything,
any sign that the world we knew was only half the truth.

Jon changed that night. We both did.
We stopped asking for proof.
We started paying attention.

Maybe belief isn’t about faith, or science, or answers.
Maybe it’s about learning to live with questions.
About letting the mysteries breathe.
About honoring the things that can’t be proven,
but still change you.

What we found was never a ghost caught on tape,
or a face in the window.
It was the charge of possibility,
the ache of unfinished stories,
the fierce need to believe in something bigger than ourselves.

In chasing shadows,
we found each other–
and found a reason to keep chasing,
even when the hunt is done.

Invisible Ink x Going Through the Motions Going (Mashup)

She’s three feet away and she’s somewhere past the state line,
Thumbs running across the glass like I’m not on her timeline.
Up at the approximate correct time—the clock says something close to right,
Coffee before seven, check the back lock, step into the light
Of the morning’s practiced opening sequence, the established run
Of tooth and mirror and the choosing of the shirt—the done
And done-again of every morning laid out before me
Like the worn path through the field where someone in a story
Walked their whole life without asking what was at the end—
I walk it. I’m efficient. I attend.
Going
Going

I pour the second cup she won’t finish and stand by the stove,
Listening to the house, trying to find the seam or the groove
Where we stopped being people and became a floor plan —
Two bodies crossing the same hallway who used to have a plan.
I memorized the way she used to enter a room,
The way she’d find my eyes from across whatever distance
We were navigating — now she navigates a bloom
Of notifications and I’ve learned to keep my distance
From whatever’s over there, past the pillow, past the wall,
Past the bed that used to feel like somewhere
and now just feels like where I sleep.

Invisible ink on everything I said to you,
Every word I laid down let the light right through,
Two people in a house where only one of us is home —
I’ve been going so transparent I think I’m nearly gone.
Going through the motions—going.
The sequence holds without the showing
Of the person in the mechanism, the ghost
Inside the working—going through the motions, coast
To coast from door to desk to door, the calibrated grace
Of someone who has memorized the space
They’re moving through without the need to feel it—
Going through the motions. I can steal it.

I’m genuinely good at this—I’ll take that credit without hedging.
The performance is solid, the external edging
Of a man who’s present holds up under the casual inspection
Of the open office, the hallway, the mid-meeting question
About my thoughts on a thing I’m listening to—
I have thoughts. I deliver them. I do
The thing and then the next thing and then the drive back
And the door again and the evening’s different track
Of the same going-through-the-motions—quieter,
Less witnessed, the interior running at the quieter
Register of the same unfeeling function.
The couch. The screen. The junction
Of another day successfully completed and not felt.
The hand I was dealt.

A hollow arrangement of the life we didn’t share
Enough of, in the end. I set the keys down, take the chair.
Tell me something real — I practice that
in the mirror some mornings,
Something true, something off the card you keep — no warnings,
But I put the coffee down and follow all the warnings
Of a man who’s learned what questions he should keep
To himself, who’s gotten good at quiet,
Who’s made a kind of peace with being present but unread,
Who sets the alarm and takes his side and doesn’t riot —
And lies in the dark a little further from the edge
Of the bed each night.
Going
Going

Going through the motions going through—
The desk, the drive, the door, the residue
Of a man who memorized the route
And runs it without variance or doubt.
Going through the motions. Shows up. Delivers.
Going through the motions. Something shivers
Underneath the function—something that remembers
Wanting this. Going through the motions. Embers.
Invisible ink on everything I said to you,
Every word I laid down let the light right through.
Two people in a house where only one of us is home —
I’ve been going so transparent I think I’m nearly gone.

Two bodies in a hallway, two ghosts in a plan,
One going through the motions, one fading where they stand.
The couch. The screen. The practiced, quiet spin,
The floor plan closing where the life should’ve been.

Going through the motions—still. Concerned.
Invisible ink on everything we learned.
Two people in a house where only one of us is home,
Going through the motions, going
Going
Gone.

Island of the Dolls, Mexico — Play With Me
by Dawg

Drowned beneath the moon’s unflinching stare,
a raft of memories drifts through stagnant air.
Branches shudder with strung-up bodies, porcelain grins cracked wide–
limbs half-eaten by time, button eyes stretched open, nothing left to hide.

Their skin collects mildew and secrets, painted lips split in a silent scream,
each tiny dress stiff with rain, every finger curling, warped by feverish dream.
Above the black canal, the dolls swing, garlanded by rotten rope–
souls long stripped of purpose, now sentinels for the hopeless and the broke.

The trees’ crooked fingers cradle a hundred faces–childish, grotesque, obscene,
some heads upturned in yearning, others stitched shut, sightless and unclean.
Once a tribute, now a horde–gathered for a girl the river could not forgive,
each plastic witness cradles a wailing echo, proof that pain can outlive.

The wind is cruel and ceaseless, plucking braids and gnawing at waxen cheeks,
mouths left open to swallow sorrow, to taste the truth that no one speaks.
Fishermen murmur legends–how the caretaker once heard a drowned girl’s plea,
how he fed the island broken toys, terrified that her ghost would never let him be.

Nights here are slow dissolutions, dense with insect wings and rot,
candle stubs flicker in hollow skulls, hope a luxury quickly forgot.
If a visitor lingers too long beneath the suffocating vines,
they’ll hear water slapping like tiny hands, or the faintest voice that whines.

There’s no escape from the stare of the island’s strange assembly,
their silent vigil mocks the living, their patience predatory and uncanny.
For each doll is a prison, every grin a cell,
caging whatever lost thing the canal refused to quell.

No savior waits in the dark, no saint blesses this sodden plot–
only the drowned, the forgotten, and the unloved, haunting a paradise God forgot.
As dawn peels open the clouds and the water glows like old bone,
the dolls stand guard, chained by sorrow, forever alone.
If you listen, you might hear the invitation–quiet, teasing, never free:
stay, stay forever–come play with me.

Island of the Dolls
by Dawg

In the heart of the canals, where the water moves slow as sorrow,
rot clings to the roots, and the trees wear the skins of the damned–
every branch bears a doll, hollow-eyed and broken,
their plastic limbs cracked by too many summers,
their mouths twisted wide, forever caught between laughter and warning.

Legend claims a drowned girl lies somewhere beneath the tangled reeds,
hair spread wide, dress snagged on the bones of old secrets.
Her story caught the caretaker–driven by guilt, by superstition,
by the need to bargain with death–
he hung the first doll as an apology to something he could never save.
But superstition is an infection, and grief breeds ritual–
now the trees are crowded with offerings,
each one a hostage to the past.

After midnight, the island becomes its own country–a dictatorship of fear.
No moonlight gentle enough to soften the edges,
only blue shadows chewing at the ground.
The dolls don’t just hang–they guard, they watch, they judge,
sentries for a crime that never found a verdict.

Some say they’ve seen the girl–her shape in the water, her shadow crossing the path,
a sudden chill, the tug of a small hand at the edge of vision.
Cries drift up with the mist, soft as the sound of a mother mourning.
Sometimes she’s laughter, high and bright, running between the trees;
other times, just the slow creak of a rope or the brush of hair against your arm.

Night after night, the air thickens, the dolls become restless,
eyes flick in the dark, stitched mouths curve
as if remembering the taste of a scream.
No peace here–just the endless carousel of loss.

Stand in the clearing and listen–
hear the sharp giggle of plastic throats,
the hush of secrets twisted tight,
the soft pleadings of a little girl who never went home.
This island doesn’t want visitors. It wants witnesses.
It wants you to hang a doll of your own, to join the silent jury.

Dawn doesn’t save you, it just reveals the evidence–
rows of ruined toys dangling from their nooses,
staring into the sun with the patience of the damned.
You walk away changed, something clinging to your back–
a weight that makes you check the mirror at midnight,
until you understand that some places are built from sorrow,
and some ghosts are content to let the dolls do their haunting for them.

Laperal House, Philippines — Nanny’s Words
by Dawg

Gnarled acacia claws the sky, the Laperal House looms–
a relic lacquered in secrets, the air thick with tombs
of memory–floorboards groan, boards stained by the years,
and every shadow stretched thin with an undercurrent of tears.

The laughter of children–too bright, too sharp–now cleaves
through rooms where dust settles like the hush of old leaves.
A nanny’s voice, gentle once, bends into lament,
her words spiraling softly, haunted, unspent.

Candlelight flickers in windows opaque with despair,
the chill in the parlor tastes of unanswered prayer.
Portraits fade in the gloom, eyes following each guest,
fixated on secrets that fester, refusing their rest.

A spectral child dances–bare feet on the blood-red stair,
her small hands searching for comfort that’s no longer there.
The nanny’s presence lingers–her lullabies thin,
each note trembling, stitched through with original sin.

In the linen-draped silence, every sigh is a plea,
a memory inked into pine and old mahogany.
Doors swing open to rooms with stories unsaid,
echoes of weeping–the living consorting with dead.

Moth-eaten curtains breathe in the evening’s stale breath,
as if stirring with memories of violence and death.
The air sags with sorrow, each gust thick with regret,
a weight pressing downward–a debt never met.

No sunrise can banish the sorrow that stains every beam,
nor can laughter erase the horrors that fill every dream.
Here, the nanny’s last words–soft, urgent, and kind–
are the only lullaby restless spirits can find.
Her voice will not falter, even as years pass by,
for she guards the lost child, never allowed to say goodbye.

Leap Castle, Ireland — The Elemental
by Dawg

In the tangled heart of Offaly where mists crawl thick as thieves,
Leap Castle rises–ancient stone, secrets clinging to its eaves.
The air is cold enough to strip marrow from your bones,
every footstep echoes with the grief of ancient thrones.

A thousand histories rot behind its scarred and battered face,
dark rituals carved in silence, cruelty etched into the place.
Shadows bloom in the oubliette, old stains refusing to fade,
as if the walls themselves remember every bargain ever made.

In the crypt-lit corridors, a presence slick and low,
breathes a malice older than men are meant to know.
The Elemental is neither man nor spirit, neither beast nor ghost–
a slithering hunger, a vaporous hand that grips the host.

It smells of rot and sulfur, dead autumn in the lungs,
its eyes flicker red in darkness, its whispers have no tongue.
It drifts between realities, swelling in every fear,
inhaling every shudder, feeding on each tear.

You feel it at your shoulder, a pulse beneath the skin,
a pressure in the ribcage, a silent gnawing din.
Blood spilled on chapel stones, kin murdered for the crown,
brothers turned on brothers, every faith torn down.

The Elemental took root, feasting on despair,
its touch colder than midnight, its hatred everywhere.
It thrives on pain unspoken, on terror locked away,
it is the memory of murder, of faith gone astray.

In the dungeons, time collapses–a pit with no relief,
despair becomes a constant, stitched to every grief.
No light dispels its shadow, no courage breaks its hold,
it is the truth of darkness–the stories never told.
And when the night is thickest, and silence tastes like rust,
it’s the Elemental you’ll encounter–
a nightmare you cannot trust.

Lizzie Borden House, Massachusetts — Axe Me No Questions
by Dawg

In Fall River, the fog curls thick as accusation on the street,
history’s breath rising cold off clapboards beneath your feet.
Victorian facade wears its story like an unwashed stain,
a house where memory’s barbed wire wraps around every windowpane.

The night is sharper here, bracing as unfinished prayers,
unanswered questions drifting down the wallpapered stairs.
In the kitchen, time stalls, a sticky whisper of dread,
as if every shadow’s been counting the heartbeats of the dead.

Axe blades hang invisible above each nervous head,
echoes of guilt sharpen the floorboards, footsteps heavy with what’s unsaid.
Sin breeds in the plaster–secrets multiply in the dust,
blood lore immortalized in every visitor’s whispered disgust.

Lizzie’s ghost doesn’t float; she patrols, restless, defined,
her legacy cleaves through the rumors no verdict could ever unwind.
You lie awake, breath shallow, in a bed dressed for the dead,
the weight of myth in your chest, suspicion rattling your head.

A rustle in the hallway, a murmur against the wall,
the past replays its violence–so close, you almost recall
the cadence of the axe, the soft gasp before the blow,
how blood might paint the wainscot, how innocence learned to go.

Beneath the old gaslights, stories rise, venomous and cold,
Lizzie’s gaze is unblinking–her motives forever controlled.
Pain sharpens the silence, every echo tightly wound,
this is no gentle haunting; it’s accusation’s battleground.

History’s breath hangs heavy, trembling on every stair,
Borden’s legend gnaws at reason, splintering the air.
No comfort in daylight, no release when dawn is near–
the Lizzie Borden house survives on a diet of fear.
Every whisper’s a witness, every echo a clue,
every room is a courtroom, and tonight, it’s judging you.

Axe me no questions, and I’ll offer no lies,
but in this house of verdicts, the innocent never survive.

McRaven House, Mississippi — Mississippi’s Haunt
by Dawg

Deep where the kudzu strangles the fence and the hush never lifts,
McRaven sits in stillness, holding centuries in its fists.
White columns lean with exhaustion, wood swollen from the flood,
porches groan at midnight–shadows thick as blood.

Every window reflects the memory of faces now erased,
curtains twitch at nothing, dust glows in moonlit waste.
A creak in the stairwell–maybe floorboards settling blame,
maybe feet from other centuries, ghosts that never learned their names.

The air is sweet with honeysuckle and rotten with decay,
in the parlor, the laughter of the dead is just a whisper away.
Footsteps slip down hallways where light will never go,
specters in hoop skirts hover, gliding soft and slow.

Walls seep old stories–stolen kisses, jealous fights,
a cradle creaks by itself through Mississippi nights.
Murder once dined at the table, grief wore a wedding gown,
history never cleaned the stains–just pressed them further down.

The garden murmurs fever–white roses growing wild,
some say a mother still weeps for her fever-stricken child.
A soldier stomps in boots, angry at his final breath,
you hear the rattle of his saber–he’s never made his peace with death.

Twilight stitches secrets, thick as magnolia scent,
and restless hands rearrange regrets that won’t relent.
Spectral faces blink from mirrors, mouths stretched in surprise,
women wail in silence, men sob without disguise.

Listen as the moonlight fingers every warped windowpane,
hear the hush of promises–love, betrayal, pain.
You’ll carry McRaven with you, a chill beneath your skin,
haunted by what lingers, haunted by what’s been.
Mississippi’s haunt is legend, its shadows thick and true–
a southern house that never sleeps, and never lets go of you.

Mind Beast
by Dawg

In the sub-basement where cognition starts to buckle and degrade,
something blind and ravenous is sharpening its blade.
It calcifies around ambition, it dissolves the better plan,
bleeds through every aspiration into something less than man.

The beast runs corridors you’ve never charted, never crossed,
it feeds on every certainty until the signal’s lost.
No exorcism waiting, no clean place in here–
just the wet machinery of something built on fear.

It moves through REM cycles with the patience of decay,
wears the face of yesterday to hollow out today,
reconstructs your finest hours into evidence of waste,
leaves a residue of failure that you never fully erase.

It has learned your compensations, every workaround you built,
every fortress of distraction you erected out of guilt.
It doesn’t need the dark to operate, the light won’t drive it back–
the beast lives in the apparatus of the things you lack.

You can medicate the perimeter, contain it for a while,
negotiate its territory mile by measured mile,
but it’s been in residence before you knew the house was real–
the beast of the mind is the oldest bill you’ll ever fail to clear.

Monte Cristo Homestead, Australia — Haunted Homestead
by Dawg

Midnight wraps the homestead in a strangling shroud,
Monte Cristo’s bones rise black against the wheeling southern cloud.
Ancestral secrets crawl beneath the porch, in shadowed beams,
a house alive with every wound, every echo of unspoken screams.

Floors groan beneath invisible feet, bearing grief’s old scars,
windows flicker with the fleeting faces of the restless dead–
eyes pressed to glass, imprisoned by memory, voiceless in the gloom,
in every silent corridor, the chill of mourning seeps through each room.

A woman’s wail floats up the stair, cold as the grave she never fled,
her rage preserved in faded linens, her vengeance left unsaid.
The housekeeper’s curse still walks at night, fingers clawed and blue,
dragging chains of rumor, spite, and all the bitter truths she knew.

Portraits hang in watchful silence, secrets weighing every frame,
owners gone to dust, but their jealousies remain.
A child sobs in the nursery, unseen hands caress his hair,
a love warped by loneliness, a terror choking the stale air.

Every clock ticks slower here, each second clings and moans,
night after night, footsteps circle round–now gone, now near–
ghosts gather by the staircase, savoring the taste of fear.
Candles gutter on the landing, flames bent by unseen breath,
every shadow warps and stretches, hinting at untimely death.

Monte Cristo remembers, and will not release its claim–
a haunted house built of malice, devotion, and shame.
No visitor leaves unchanged, no heart escapes its weight,
in Monte Cristo’s haunted halls, the living and the dead commiserate.

Moundsville Penitentiary, West Virginia — Cold Steel
by Dawg

Past the floodlights and razor wire, under a sky hammered flat and gray,
Moundsville rises, a monster built for punishment–swallowing hope by the day.
Iron gates groan like a warning, every bar hums with sin,
the air bites at your nerves–regret and rust and memory digging in.

These corridors never forget, lined with claw marks and names scraped raw,
the scent of sweat and violence sours every cinderblock law.
Cell doors clang a music only the broken understand,
cold steel holds the sorrow, hunger, and fury of the damned.

Here, agony is scripture, each night a new commandment in pain,
blood and remorse etched deeper than rain ever could stain.
You walk the range, boots echoing off walls that bred despair,
where men scratched prayers in plaster–begging for anyone to care.

Ghosts pace in shackles, their sentences never done,
they rise in the hours when the guards are gone, and freedom’s just a pun.
Feel the shiver in your marrow, hear the whispers on the block,
names of killers, thieves, and loners–legacies chiseled in rock.

Redemption’s a rumor the stones refuse to repeat,
every cell is a tomb for a promise, every hour incomplete.
Solitude grows monstrous, a fever in the blood,
men go mad in silence, drowning in the flood.

Walk slow in these blocks, let the past weigh your tread,
this is where innocence evaporates, replaced by dread.
Moundsville is a mausoleum with a heartbeat, a beast you cannot flee,
its hunger never sated, its history never free.

You enter as a stranger, you leave a piece behind,
some wounds aren’t visible, some chains are in the mind.
Cold steel keeps the ledger, ghosts remember every name.
In Moundsville’s frozen arteries, even the dead don’t die.

Moving Through the Crowd

Moving through the crowd at the memorial is its own education —
The specific navigation
Of who knew him which way, the various
Claims of relationship, the various
Descriptions of the man that emerge from the various
Mouths in the various
Positions of the room, the multiple men he was.

He was the colleague for the people from the office —
The specific specific of the caucus
Of the professional relationship, the man
Who showed up to meetings, who ran
The projects with a specific quality of attention,
Who was in the collective mention
Of the office narrative as a certain kind.

Moving through the crowd at the memorial
Is the multiple-man education, the serial
Encounter with the different relationships
That built the person, the different ships
In which he sailed across different waters
With different people, the specific daughters
And sons of his influence in the room.

And none of them are wrong — the office portrait
And the neighborhood portrait and the portrait
Of the old friend who knew him at twenty-two
Are all true, all real, all through
The specific prism of the relationship —
And none of them is the complete ship,
The full man, the total account.

The closest thing to the full account is standing in the room
With all the versions, in the specific bloom
Of the collective grief, where the multiple men
He was are all being honored, and then
The specific man that emerges from the multiplicity —
The specific and the public
Portrait that the memorial briefly assembles.

I walked the room and heard twelve different men described —
And recognized them all, the prescribed
Names all recognizably him — the same
Intelligence and the same face
Applied differently in different contexts,
The same person in twelve different texts
Assembling themselves in the room into the one.

New Orleans, Louisiana — The Axeman
by Dawg

Midnight leans over New Orleans,
pressing secrets into the slick cobblestones and the moss-heavy air–
gaslight flickers on the shadowed corners,
as if the darkness itself recoils from what happened there.

A city uncoils in sweat and song,
but the tune is edged in panic–every horn riff, every drumbeat,
a code for the wary, a warning for the weak,
a whispered remembrance of footsteps that never retreat.

Between 1918 and 1919, terror shaped itself from iron and midnight,
the Axeman’s hand, heavy as fate,
lifted doors from hinges, reduced locks to splinters,
turned comfort into flight.

He moved as a myth–smoke in the keyhole,
the whisper at the foot of a stair,
a phantom who left only absence:
hearts stopped in their beds,
lullabies torn to silent despair.

Police chased shadows,
while families shivered behind barricaded windows,
hands tight on hatchets, eyes wide with regret.
His note promised life to any house filled with jazz–a macabre decree,
that night, the city pulsed wild with horns and trembling clarinets,
hoping music alone could keep the devil at bay.

Still, his legacy is more than unsolved murder–
it is the city’s collective breath, held and never exhaled,
a suspicion that danger wears any face,
that evil moves fluid in the heat and the rain,
and cannot be cornered by reason or grace.

Night in New Orleans still shivers with possibility–
the Axeman’s ghost remains,
sometimes glimpsed beneath a streetlamp,
hat brim low, axe shining in impossible moonlight,
a ripple in the silence, a footfall behind,
a presence that will not fade with the dawn.

Jazz fills the bars and alleys, yet the chill lingers–
the city endures, scarred,
haunted by the ghost of a killer who never repented, never was found,
New Orleans wearing its dread as it does its decadence:
bold, bitter, never drowned.

Night Shadow
by Dawg

I am a shadow in the night
and I wear your street like a stolen coat,
moving quiet where the porch lights can’t testify.
I don’t need a face to be remembered,
I don’t need a name to be blamed,
I just need the gap between your breath and your next breath.

The moon is a bad coin in a dirty palm,
flipping and flashing and never landing on mercy
for anybody walking alone.
I watch windows like they’re television screens showing private lives,
and every curtain is a thin lie begging to be pulled back.

I slide under the sound of traffic and dogs and distant laughter,
and the city never notices what it keeps feeding.
You think you’re safe since you lock the door,
since you check the chain,
since you do the little rituals you learned from fear.
I love those rituals.
I love the way you count.
I love the way you hesitate.
I love the way you make room for me without knowing.

I am a shadow in the night,
and I don’t stop when you close your eyes and try to disappear.
I am a shadow in the night,
and your heartbeat is a beacon with terrible manners.

I walk the hallway of my own head
and it’s full of doors that open both ways,
full of rooms where the walls remember screams like wallpaper.
I have been under beds and inside closets
and behind the polite smile of strangers.
I have been the reason your stomach goes cold for no reason.

I don’t rush, I don’t lunge, I don’t waste energy.
I let dread do the heavy lifting while I stand still and listen.

You glance back and see nothing, which is the cruelest part,
since nothing is what you’re taught to doubt.
I keep close enough to borrow your warmth,
close enough to taste the sweat of your fear,
close enough to make your shadow look wrong.
Your own outline stretches on the pavement
and it isn’t shaped like you anymore,
it’s shaped like what you’ve tried not to become.

I could be the thing behind you,
I could be the thing inside you,
I could be the thing you carry like a secret bruise.
I don’t have to touch you to ruin you,
I don’t have to speak to change you,
I just have to stay near and let your thoughts do the rest.

There’s a moment when you stop walking and listen hard,
and the whole night listens back like a crowd holding its breath.
You tell yourself it’s nothing,
you tell yourself you’re tired,
you tell yourself you’re dramatic,
and that’s when I get louder without sound.

I step into the space your confidence left behind,
and it fits me perfectly,
like it was always mine.

I am a shadow in the night,
and when you finally run,
you’ll hear your footsteps chasing you like they hate you.

Nobody Tells You About This Part

Nobody tells you about the weeknight portrait —
the one where you’re both in different rooms
doing different things, completely comfortable
in the quiet of a house that knows you both.
That’s what the long haul looks like from the inside —
not the constant togetherness, not the romantic ideal —
but two people who’ve built enough trust in the structure
that they can be separate inside it without the structure breaking.

Nobody tells you about the good quiet —
the kind that comes after years, not the kind before —
the earned quiet of two people who know
they don’t have to fill every space between them.
Nobody tells you that the weekday nights
are the whole point, not just the backdrop to the point —
that sitting in different rooms reading different things
is one of the most intimate acts I know.

I used to worry about the quiet when we first had it.
Thought it meant something was going wrong —
that the conversation running out was a sign of something,
that couples who don’t talk all evening must be in trouble.
I watched us in those first years of comfortable quiet
looking for the signs that should be worrying me,
and the signs weren’t there — just two people
who’d gotten comfortable enough to stop performing.

The performance is what you do at the beginning —
the constant best-self, the constant engagement,
the constant making sure the other person’s
experiencing you at your most appealing.
And then one evening you both just drop it —
you don’t plan to, it just runs out of fuel —
and the person underneath the performance is still good,
is actually better, is the person you can live with.

She’ll call something out from the other room sometimes —
a fact she’s just come across, a thing she remembered,
the beginning of a story she’s telling herself
that she decides mid-telling to share with me instead.
And I’ll respond, and sometimes it becomes a conversation,
and sometimes she says well, never mind, and goes back —
and both of those are right, both of those are us,
the texture of a life actually being shared.

Friends who’ve been married a long time told me early —
I didn’t listen because I couldn’t yet hear it —
they said: the boring parts are not the boring parts,
the boring parts are when you’re building something.
Now I understand what they were telling me.
The boring parts are the structure, not the problem.
The boring parts are what makes the good nights good —
the foundation that the good nights rest on.

So here we are on a weeknight in the quiet —
she’s in the other room, I’m in this one —
and I can hear the sound of her being there
the way you hear the weather, the way you hear the house.
And I’m not worried. I know what the quiet means.
The quiet means we’ve built something that doesn’t
require the constant tending to stay standing —
the quiet means we’re home. That’s what home sounds like.

Ode to Scars in Moonlight
by Dawg

Moon, surgeon of midnight, reveal the gallery of wounds,
bathed in spectral glow–each scar a relic, a hymn to endurance,
tales of battle written in flesh, stories mapped in pale relief,
markings not of shame, but of thresholds crossed,
survived betrayals, vanished allies, storms endured alone.

The scars–some thin as regret, others thick as memory–
are signatures of a will unwilling to dissolve,
fierce victories over darkness that once threatened to consume,
their gleam under moonlight is the silvered language of resilience,
each one a waypoint guiding through the corridors of midnight.

Wounds do not fade for the timid; they harden for the brave,
a proof that every howl, every loss, every grief
has built a foundation stronger than the world’s derision.
Pale moon, you do not judge the scars;
you illuminate their necessity, make beauty from their pain.

Let every mark be celebrated:
the knotted ones, reminders of fire survived;
the faded lines, ghosts of trials overcome,
for in their convergence lies a map–
a story of courage, loss, and rising once more.

To bear scars is not to be defeated, but to have written
one’s own history in ink that will not wash away.
Let the world read the story–etched in moonlit flesh,
for in every wound, the dawn waits, fierce and undaunted.

Orbit Deep Waters Sparks

Verse 1 Underneath the field of white, walking on the ground, Your hand acts as the anchor,
the only steady sound. Moving through the open space,
the steps fall into line,
In the center of the dark, your shadow mixes mine.
Chorus Sky is turning, sparks and fire, In your hold,
we climb up higher. Every step,
a gravity, Pulling you right into me.
“Verse 1 A fire burning out of bounds, where no one hears the sounds, We meet where shadows cut the floor,
behind the bolted door. Your hand strikes flint upon the skin,
where trouble dares begin,
Inside this light we stole away, we hold the dark at bay.
Chorus Secret heat, white and hot,
Steals the only breath I’ve got. Every kiss a danger sign,
In this fire, you are mine.”
Verse 1 Underneath the field of white, walking on the ground, Your hand acts as the anchor,
the only steady sound. Moving through the open space,
the steps fall into line,
In the center of the dark, your shadow mixes mine.
Chorus Sky is turning, sparks and fire, In your hold,
we climb up higher. Every step,
a gravity, Pulling you right into me.

..

..

Verse 1 Your love hits like the rising tide, With nowhere left for me to hide. With every heavy,
rolling swell, You catch me where I fell. Down below the surface blue,
I am lost inside of you.
Chorus Deep water, pulling strong, Dragging me where I belong. Every wave,
a heavy motion, Lost inside this open ocean.
“
Verse 1 A fire burning out of bounds, where no one hears the sounds, We meet where shadows cut the floor,
behind the bolted door. Your hand strikes flint upon the skin,
where trouble dares begin,
Inside this light we stole away, we hold the dark at bay.
Chorus Secret heat, white and hot,
Steals the only breath I’ve got. Every kiss a danger sign,
In this fire, you are mine.
“

Orbit Deep Waters x Between Signals (Mashup)

Orbit Deep Waters x Between Signals

Underneath the frost of white, feet stamping frozen ground,
Same alarm, same ceiling, same gray scraping glass,
Your hand becomes the mooring, the one steady sound,
Same coffee cooling on the counter — let it pass.

Moving through the empty rooms, my steps fall into line,
I run the whole performance like a late-arriving fool,
In the center of the dark, your shadow merges into mine,
Covering for all of it, I deliver by your rule.

Your love hits like a rising tide,
Nowhere left for me to hide,
Every heavy rolling swell,
You catch me where I fell.

Somewhere between the signals, somewhere in the dead air,
Lost the frequency I ran on, couldn’t find it anywhere,
Living in the in-between, can’t locate myself out there,
Tuned to every station but my own…

Deep water, pulling strong,
Dragging me to where I belong,
Every wave a heavy motion,
Lost inside this open ocean.

Pull the same shirt off the same hook,
Run the same route in the same time,
Someone asks how I’m doing — I’m doing fine,
But your tide pulls under every line.

Dinner at the counter, same show I’ve half-watched twice,
Something funny happens and I wait to feel it land,
This drift, this flat reception, this almost-present life,
Till your shadow slips in softly and takes my hand.

I used to know the border between living and performing,
Been performing being fine for too consistent a stretch,
Low-grade simulation of a man trapped in his morning,
Till your rising tide hit everything it met.

Deep water, pulling strong,
Dragging me to where I belong,
Every wave a heavy motion,
Lost inside this open ocean.

Somewhere between the signals, somewhere in the dead air,
Found the frequency I lost on, running on your wavelength there,
Finally inside the clear zone, can’t remember my despair,
Tuned at last to you and me.

Patient Watcher

He sits in hospital chairs nobody offered him,
Patient as rust, unhurried, plain.
His coat smells like old waiting rooms and rain.
He doesn’t knock or clear his throat—
Just lets the monitors write his notes,
A tenant in the building, never late.

No urgency, no grand estate,
Just steady hands that fold and wait.
He knows the paperwork by heart,
The final errand, not the art—
When breath runs short and bodies stall,
He simply answers when they call.

In the hallway where the linoleum peels
There’s a presence that was always here.
Death leans quiet, patient, austere,
Counting down what no one feels
Until they do. His shadow spreads
Across the floor like unmade beds—
He knows that everyone gets still.
To him it’s just a house call, nothing ill.

Oh, Patient Watcher at the door
With quiet hands and nothing left to prove
You wait and wait, you never force or score
You just outlast us all and let us move
Of our own will, toward you, the only debt
That every living thing has paid and can’t forget

His face is plain but always close,
A pressure felt, a draft that knows
The rhythm of each stubborn chest.
He hears us bargain, hears us rest,
From first cry to the final slow
He waits for hands to finally let go.
And though we curse what he bestows,
It’s just the tab that always grows.

In quiet rooms where machines keep time
He lingers close with nothing left to say.
No hurry, only steady, certain sway
Over lives that pass like nickels and dimes.
Yet gentle too—a porter, not a thief,
Whose grip will end what breath began, with brief relief.

Oh, Patient Watcher at the door
With quiet hands and nothing left to prove
You wait and wait, you never force or score
You just outlast us all and let us move
Of our own will, toward you, the only debt
That every living thing has paid and can’t forget

Pendulum’s Promise
by Dawg

The clock in the hall is a crooked judge,
swinging its verdict over sleepless skin,
the pendulum’s arc slicing midnight into halves–
one for fear, one for regret, both for the condemned.

No redemption in the hush, just the slow groan of old wood
remembering who’s been lost,
every swing a reckoning, the past returning,
the present refusing to forget.

Time drips from the ceiling in thick, unseen threads,
each second a wound that won’t close,
shadows clutch at the corners,
bending with every shift of the moon’s cold stare–
a moon that promises nothing but more hours to endure,
more secrets to choke on.

The air in the room is bruised with memory,
haunted by promises that curdled on lips,
each tick a needle stitching dread along the inside of my chest,
threading through every story I never finished.

Some nights, the house groans beneath the weight of unfinished business,
floorboards sighing with each pass,
the pendulum dragging hours behind it like shackles,
demanding I account for what I ran from.

Sometimes, I see the shape of her in the window’s reflection,
a flicker of hair, the hint of a smirk,
a reminder that the worst haunts are the ones we made ourselves–
no exorcism for memories that sleep in your sheets,
no priest for the ache that crawls up your thighs.

Moonlight bleeds through torn curtains,
painting the walls in the faded colors of arguments we never finished,
the house holding its breath, the air sharp as a blade,
each shadow another reason to stay awake.

Every room is thick with what-ifs and almosts,
the air swollen with things unsaid,
the clock’s swinging heart tracing circles around desire,
absence, the animal need for absolution.

The sun comes up gray, apologetic, slipping through cracks in the wood,
but the promise remains,
the clock unwinding its old threats with every new day.
All the years, all the bodies,
all the fucked-up prayers and midnight confessions,
all weighed and measured beneath the watchful swing,
and I, left here, haunted and hungry,
learning to call this shadowed ground my own.

In the end, every promise is a haunting–
every hour a confession–every tick a dare,
and the pendulum, swinging through the gloom,
offers nothing but the truth:
that none of us walk away untouched,
that every heart carries a ghost,
and every night, beneath the moon’s unblinking eye,
we choose whether to keep running from the shadows,
or to hold them close,
and let the pendulum decide what we become.

Perron Family Haunting, RI — Restless Spirit
by Dawg

Within the hush of forgotten fields, where twilight clings and shadows weave,
the farmhouse stands, a fractured relic where restless souls refuse reprieve.
Whispers coil through stagnant air, insidious murmurs wrapped in dread,
a spectral chorus wails unseen, their voices threading through the dead.

Cold as winter’s biting breath, the walls exhale a ghostly chill,
echoes cradle shattered lives, a legacy that time cannot still.
Terror lingers like a fog, thick with grief and muted cries,
the Perron name engraved in night beneath unyielding, watchful skies.

From darkness, piercing eyes emerge–sharp as frost, relentless and clear,
witnesses to agonies long past, their stories etched in frozen fear.
The floorboards groan beneath their steps, the air weighed down by silent pain,
every corner bears a mark where sorrow and madness reign.

Phantom forms drift restless through the pitch-black halls and broken dreams,
a prison forged from memory, a crucible of silent screams.
Their presence gnaws upon the mind, a ceaseless, clawing, spectral tide,
reminders of a cursed past that never truly died.

No refuge lies within these walls; the past consumes with cold intent,
a crucible of lingering woe, where life and nightmare are tightly bent.
Darkness deepens, shadows grow, the restless stir and draw close near,
their murmurs fill the frigid air with dread no mortal heart should hear.

In this forsaken farmhouse, fear is sovereign, time stands still and bleak,
an eternal vigil kept by those whose peace they’ll never seek.

Phoenix Reborn
by Dawg

In the cemetery of broken dreams, night presses in–
a cold, relentless judge,
every gravestone etched with the story of another hope torn down,
another wish unfulfilled.

Frost devours the bones of ambitions,
and the ground remembers every desperate pledge,
and hope itself seems a rare disease,
infected by the ashes of all it once willed.

Yet from this ossuary of vanished laughter,
beneath the granite and the moss,
something stirs with the arrogance of defiance–
a single ember refusing to be stilled.

Beneath funereal clouds, beneath the weight of every faded vow,
a whispering flame finds shelter in the cracks
between what was and what could be.
No priest nor mourner marks this resurrection,
no witness but the grave itself–
still, through the bedrock of loss,
the phoenix claws upward, dragging fire from its own debris.

The graveyard is crowded with defeat,
yet this rebellion burns unrepentant,
a fire born of pain and scavenged memory,
never begging for the light but making its own.

Wings unfurl, gold threaded with the charcoal of loss,
each beat scattering the ancient night,
a new dawn threatened with color,
the cinders beneath writhing with heat and intent.

From every cold tomb and every dire plot,
where hearts once surrendered to the appetite of worms and regret,
the phoenix tears open the soil, refusing to rot,
rises shrieking, crowned in smoke and radiant with unmet debt.
Its call is a blade–cutting through memory’s rot–
a declaration to the dusk: I am not finished yet.

A creature both made and unmade by agony and belief,
turning every bleak ending into a beginning that never bends.
From ashes, from endings, from the yawning dark–rebirth transcends,
and the graveyard of broken dreams is razed
by the fever of its own relief.

Pompeii, Italy — Ashes to Ashes
by Dawg

Pompeii, Italy–where volcanic shadow fell and daylight never returned,
a city carved in agony, stone mouths parted in screams that the world has learned.
Vesuvius loomed, its rage unbound, raining fire that sculpted despair,
ash sealed every secret: lovers entwined, prayers rising to gods who weren’t there.

Ancient streets spiral with memory, basalt arteries choked by cinder and bone,
market stalls abandoned mid-bargain, the clatter of commerce turned to drone.
Porticoes blackened by sulfur, frescoes cracked beneath the weight of unending night,
statues hold their last expressions–hope, terror, surrender–caught in that deadly light.

Within the amphitheater, applause silenced by molten stone,
rows of empty seats cradle the shadows of those who’ll never return home.
Murals fade where wine once spilled, laughter trapped in the plaster’s veins,
echoes chase through ruined courtyards, haunted by a thousand silent refrains.

Night falls over Pompeii, ancient wind whistling through shattered domes,
a chill that is not merely weather, but memory searching for homes.
Pale figures drift by moonlight, open-mouthed, forever still,
cloaked in volcanic sorrow, lingering at the edge of will.

In Pompeii’s cryptic silence, the past roars louder than the living can know,
a thousand lives frozen–mothers, soldiers, slaves–in an unbroken tableau.
No goddess or mortal was spared when Vesuvius tore the world apart,
only the city remains, a monument to grief, scorched deep into the heart.

Ashes to ashes–the mantra burned into every fractured stone,
Pompeii: haunted cradle of tragedy, where the spirits walk alone.
Every midnight, in this grave of memory, Pompeii breathes dread anew–
a city embalmed in suffering, waiting for the world to hear what it always knew.

Pontefract, England — The Black Monk House
by Dawg

Pontefract broods beneath sullen skies,
wind pressing its chill through the bricks of Number 30 East Drive,
a house born of postwar optimism,
now saturated with dread–every stone, every doorframe,
complicit in what survives.

Behind faded curtains and the measured tick of a clock,
silence is never empty;
it fills with the dust that refuses to settle,
with the memory of footsteps that echo out of sequence.

The floorboards mutter in protest at the weight of things unseen–
an overturned photograph, a bruise on a child’s arm,
family names muttered like a prayer for protection
as something cold flickers past, relentless, disarming.

A monk swathed in shadow, face a smudge beneath a hood,
moving with predatory patience through rooms
papered in faded roses and regret.
His hands, invisible, reach for lamps and glasses,
for hair and heartstrings–
disturbances ripple out like a blasphemous duet.

In the darkness, glass shatters, the air goes still–
panic blooms sudden, silent, absolute.
No priest’s blessing, no expert’s cross, no salt laid careful at thresholds,
can chase the Black Monk from his claim.

Objects soar in the air, water seeps where no pipes run,
candles flare and die, the air curdles,
a sickly hush falls as night blots out the sun.
The monk–once hanged for nameless sin, they say–
returns nightly for his ritual of fright.

Walls sweat with the fever of the past;
lightbulbs burst with a crack that signals his arrival,
a figure in the periphery, robe as black as consequence,
face featureless, given over entirely to denial.

Even when the living abandon the place,
Pontefract holds the secret close–
the monk remains, untouchable.
A house no longer home but reliquary–
a monument to the unfinished, the unforgiven.
Within these walls, the Black Monk watches,
and nothing is ever quite as it dreams.

Possession by Proxy
by Dawg

In the rotting heart of a city long past caring,
where towers hunched like broken vertebrae
against a permanent bruise of a sky,
Clare moved through her days as a ghost might:
invisible but not unseen,
present but somehow erased.

At first, the encroaching darkness revealed itself
as minor infractions in reality’s order.
A flicker in the corner of her vision that never resolved into form;
a phrase she’d written in her own hand but had no memory of thinking;
cold patches forming in her flat,
clustering in corners like invisible bruises.

When the blackouts began, there was no warning.
She simply ceased to exist,
then returned, battered and gasping,
to a body that felt less her own each time.

The dread settled in stages–
slow, methodical, patient as poison.
She studied herself in the mirror
and found her own expression impenetrable–
her face belonged to someone else,
or perhaps to no one at all.

Old Madge, half legend, half threat,
the city’s oracle and its embarrassment,
followed Clare’s every move with eyes
feral and bright as cut glass.
“It’s not just you in there, darling.
You’re full of holes, and something’s leaking through.”

“Possession,” Madge said.
“A parasite in the soul.
A demon that’s learned patience.
When you vanish, it walks. It practices.
Each time, it grows bolder.”

Sleep became treacherous–
her bed a raft on dark, uncertain waters.
She woke to strange wounds and stranger cravings,
her dreams violent–
a tangle of red hands, staring eyes,
and voices chanting in languages she’d never learned.

Jason–her last link to normalcy–
found her on the steps of a derelict church.
“Clare, what’s happening to you?”
She flinched. “Don’t.
It’s inside me. Something old. Something hungry.”

“We’ll fight it together,” he insisted,
but Clare heard the laughter bubbling up inside her,
dark and cruel and utterly not her own.

In that moment, Clare realized the true horror:
possession was never about loss of control.
It was about erasure–
a slow, methodical rewriting of a life
until only the shadows remained.

The city would not remember her name.
The demon would.
And that was its greatest victory of all.

Poveglia Island, Italy — Echoes of Sorrow
by Dawg

Poveglia drifts in the Venetian lagoon,
caught forever between tide and time,
its shores stained by centuries of silence and suffering.

Rotting pilings and crumbling walls betray the legacy of quarantine,
where plague ships once drifted with cargoes
of fevered breath and final prayers,
and the soft black soil–more bone than earth–
remembers every pyre, every desperate gasp,
every name lost in the ash-streaked air.

Beneath the weight of ruined bell towers,
empty wards echo with whispers–choked, delirious,
the lullabies of those who never left their beds,
their laments carried on the salt breeze,
tangling in nettle-choked courtyards
where time stands sentinel over despair.

Once, the boatmen shunned these waters after sundown;
stories of burning eyes in the reeds, the toll of unseen bells,
of phantom hands clutching at passing hulls,
desperate to be ferried from damnation
to even a moment of peace.

The wind sobs through shattered archways,
carrying the fever dreams of the afflicted–
children’s voices pleading for mothers,
priests murmuring last rites,
physicians surrendering hope.

Centuries passed, but the island’s appetite for sorrow remained unsatisfied.
The hospice’s iron beds rusted,
but screams still vibrate through peeling corridors.
Legends multiply with each generation:
a doctor’s fatal leap from the bell tower,
the laughter of something not quite human in the basements.

Now, cormorants haunt the chimneys;
grass climbs the steps where the dying once pleaded for water.
Every shadow on Poveglia is layered–plague upon plague, secret upon secret,
a litany of the forsaken sung by wind and stone and the restless dead.

To set foot here is to inherit the weight of a thousand last goodbyes,
to breathe air that tastes of salt and fire, of medicine and rot,
to feel history’s grip tightening with each step,
and to carry away, in marrow and memory,
the certainty that some sorrow never releases its hold.

In Poveglia’s haunted hush, pain is immortal–
and the world remembers, if only in passing,
that the dead here will not let go.

Pretty When She’s Broken

She draws lipstick like a blade,
red smudged like sins she never made
Whispers to herself in the mirror,
“Smile, bitch, you’re still paid”
But her eyes are cracked glass,
mascara warpaint for the wars she never chose
Nights blur in motel ceilings,
ashtray prayers and throbbing ceilings
She fucks to forget, brehes to survive,
laughs like something feral’s healing
Every touch is a dare—will this be the one that makes her cave?
Pretty when she’s broken, brutal when she’s sane
Her moans sound like mercy, her silence like rain
You want her? You’ll never know her title
She’s a masterpiece made of scars and shame
She danced on pills for breakfast,
skipped the part where she was fine
Screamed into pillows like her soul owed rent on time
And when she came,
she clutched the void like it owed her something kind
Her smile’s the kind that says “run,
” but her thighs say “stay and bleed”
She needs love like a bullet needs a chamber,
like poison needs to feed
She’s not lonely,
she’s just full of ghosts that won’t fucking leave
Pretty when she’s broken, perfect in her fall
You want salvation? Crawl.
She’ll fuck your title off the wall.
Ready for 306: straight into a”My List”song—just say the word.

Red Shift

Everything is shifting red behind my eyelids when they close,
the infrared of wanting painted everywhere she goes
in memory — the kitchen, leaning back against the sink,
the way the cotton clung to wet skin faster than I’d think.

I’m Doppler-shifting toward her from a distance I can’t cross,
the frequency of wanting turning everything to loss
of sleep, of sense, of anything resembling a thought
that isn’t the voluptuous trajectory she’s wrought.

Red shift — everything is pulling,
everything is drawn toward the heat,
she’s the center of the wavelength
and I’m tangled in the sheet.

She bit a peach today and let the juice run past her chin,
and I have been relitigating that original sin
for seven hours — the rivulet from lip to collarbone,
the way she wiped it with her wrist and left me here alone

to reconstruct the moment in libidinous detail,
the tongue, the fruit, the dripping, and the inadvertent trail
across the kind of skin that glows when afternoon light falls —
and now I’m lying in the dark, bouncing off the walls.

Concupiscent and stupid from the replaying of the scene,
the peach, the juice, the throat,
the chest — the most rapacious screen
my mind has ever offered up, and I am captive to it,
febrile, tumescent, sleepless — and I’m going through it

frame by frame by frame again, the insatiable reel,
and there’s no cooling down from what the body’s made to feel
at three a.m. when she’s asleep and I am burning bright,
red-shifted past the visible and deep into the night.

Rising from the Ruins
by Dawg

Amid toppled gravestones where yesterday’s burdens rot,
regrets crumble in damp earth–each one named and forgot.
No wailing wind will resurrect their mournful dirge,
yet beneath the ruin, a subtler urge
coaxes a stubborn green from all that was lost–
hope finding foothold, no matter the cost.

Failures lie fetid, their bitterness spent,
yet from their decay, new strength is unbent.
Among monuments carved by sorrow and shame,
old sins weather down, surrendering their claim.
Roots twist through the cracks of each stone’s confession,
drawing sustenance from every fallen obsession.

Ghosts gather at dusk, their whispers heavy with blame,
but dawn brings a shimmer that none can tame.
Dreams–once buried beneath defeat’s debris–
push through the soil, fierce and unruly, hungry to be free.

Shadows stretch long across plots of remorse,
yet in their darkness, resolve charts a course.
Every lost hope, every mistake once feared,
becomes compost for the courage that’s neared.

The past is not kind, but it isn’t the end–
just the compost for futures that bend
toward possibility, toward hunger, toward bloom–
sprouting bright shoots from the heart of the gloom.

In the ruined garden of memory’s domain,
what withers and falls is never in vain.
Every grave is a cradle, every tear feeds the root,
of resilience and hope in perpetual pursuit.
There’s no crown for the haunted, no scepter for regret–
only growth from what’s dead, and the will not to forget.
Where tombstones mark failures, life’s cycle resumes–
rising from ruins, something fearless blooms.

Salem, Massachusetts — Trials
by Dawg

Under the gallows’ ruin, where night refuses to forget,
Salem’s cobblestone arteries pulse with ancestral regret.
Moonlight fractures on rooftops, splintering across colonial bone,
every shadow stretches longer in a town condemned alone.

The Witch House leans on history, its timbers tight with pain,
muffled by prayers unanswered, by verdicts that remain.
Justice faltered in these alleyways, trembling under false pretense,
specters of hysteria twisting every ounce of sense.

Here, women and men–unlucky, unloved, unspared–
became legend in a fever, cursed by hands that never cared.
Judges sharpened verdicts, tongues dripping with dread,
the law a marionette, pulling strings for the dead.

Each home a silent witness, each hearth a courtroom’s spectacle,
neighbors traded accusations like currency for rage.
The wind remembers curses hurled from scaffold high,
and laughter muffled by rope, and pleading forced to die.

Footsteps falter at midnight by the old burying ground,
where lichen climbs the tombstones, where the lost are never found.
The condemned are restless–still pleading with the rain,
hoping for forgiveness that never came, never came.

The Witch House sighs with memory, each door a nervous plea,
even the air is brittle, every echo tight with grief,
the soil itself remembers the taste of disbelief.

Cemeteries cradle the restless, voices caught in stone,
the condemned recite their innocence to moss and bone.
On the wind, old whispers tangle, thick with accusation,
you leave with a piece of the gallows wound tight around your heart,
marked by the spectral symphony that never will depart.
In Salem, darkness lingers–truth and legend both confined–
where every trial echoes, and the past is never left behind.

Savannah, Georgia — Haunted City
by Dawg

Cobblestones clutch stories, swallowing centuries whole,
each groove in the mossy street carved by sorrow’s toll.
Spanish moss droops from branches, veiling secrets, old and wise,
where Bonaventure’s angels mourn with rain in hollowed eyes.

Every house leans in whisper, shutters groaning with regret,
red brick sweats the legend of debts not settled yet.
Night breathes heavy in Savannah, perfumed with despair,
the living walk with caution–ghosts are everywhere.

Lanterns flicker hazy, painting gold on ancient walls,
the air tastes of jasmine, blood, and unanswered calls.
Spectral hands embroider dusk with longing and dismay,
echoes swirling in the squares where broken soldiers lay.

Bonaventure Cemetery aches beneath its canopies of grief,
names carved into marble worn down like belief.
Ghosts linger at the mausoleums, lips mouthing names,
mourning all the children, the slaves, the unclaimed.

Darkness weaves through alleys, thick as southern wine,
every shadow knows the script, rehearsed across time.
Beneath the ivy’s tangle, beneath each crooked stair,
you feel the weight of memory, you taste the thickness of the air.

Children’s voices echo, a lullaby gone wrong,
footsteps on old floorboards, a half-remembered song.
Somewhere near Forsyth Park, shadows bend and bow,
saluting the processions of the then and the now.

When dawn crawls in reluctant, dragging mist through every street,
the city yawns in silence, never ready to retreat.
The dead keep their appointments; the living heed the code–
Savannah’s past is present, alive on every road.
Savannah, haunted darling, in your shadows we confess:
the living walk in mystery, and the dead will never rest.

Shattered Glass Covenant

I woke with my face pressed to cracked mirror while something behind the reflection grinned with teeth I’d never grown
Dark bled through ceiling plaster like ink from a suicide letter,
pooling at my feet in accusations
Every breath tasted of copper and broken vows,
the air thick with whispers of drowned men calling my name
I stumbled through hallways that stretched into forever,
doors breathing cold exhales that stank of rot
My reflection reached through shattered glass with fingers made of smoke and hunger,
dragging me toward its jagged grin
Blood welled at the mirror’s edge as I swung my fist,
cracks spider-webbing across reality itself
The thing wearing my face whispered every sin I’d buried,
every lie I’d swallowed like poison
My lungs burned with rust and regret as it pulled me deeper
where the light runs out
I screamed into an ocean of everything I’d wrecked and surfaced naked to the dark,
stripped clean
When the final shard carved my cheek I was half-blind
but fully awake to the haunting
I wear these scars now,
proof that some men stand tallest
when there’s nothing left to save them from themselves
The mirror lies in pieces but the reflection still watches from every fragment,
waiting for me to sleep again

Skin Deep And Sinking

She moves like a rumor through a room of true believers
Each eye a convert, every pulse a weak receiver
He’s been down this road before — got the scars to prove the mileage
But the road looks brand new every time,
and that’s the real violence
Touch like a match strike, vanish before the smoke clears
Built a whole cathedral out of one night, prayed to it for years

It ain’t love and he knows it, it ain’t even close
But the closest thing to feeling is the thing that burns the most

Skin deep and sinking,
can’t tell need from want when you’re this far down
Skin deep and sinking,
mistook the heat for something solid, something sound
The fire’s real enough, but fire doesn’t hold you when it’s done
Skin deep and sinking, chasing what you can’t outrun

She’s got a name he’ll say wrong every single morning
Not from cruelty — from the fact he never really learned it
There’s a version of connection he keeps almost reaching
And a version of himself he hasn’t quite yet earned it
Every body is a country he visits but never lives in
Every passport full of stamps from places he fled before winter

And the loneliness is patient, waits outside the door
Knows he’ll need it like a blanket
when the wanting’s done once more

There was a girl once — real, not a record or a conquest
Not a highlight reel — she said I see you
and he flinched like she’d swung at him
Because being seen was so much more terrifying than being wanted
So he traded depth for frequency, traded known for new
Built a life from exits and disasters,
called it freedom, called it true
But freedom’s got a hollow sound when it echoes back alone
And the bed keeps getting emptier the more bodies fill it up

Skin deep and sinking,
can’t tell need from want when you’re this far down
Skin deep and sinking,
mistook the heat for something solid, something sound
The fire’s real — God,
the fire’s real — but it burns the house
and leaves you in the yard
Skin deep, just skin deep, never got past skin deep at all

Smurl House, Pennsylvania — Infested
by Dawg

Twilight presses in–shadows writhe and ripple along the battered walls,
the Smurl House stands, stubborn and silent, bearing the burden of unspoken calls.
A relic gnawed by time and darkness,
every brick stitched with memories scarred and deep,
haunted by something older than grief,
a presence lurking where light dares not creep.

Every groan of the floorboards–every sharp, metallic snap–
signals the slow encroachment of terror, a dread that will never collapse.
Behind faded wallpaper and stained crown molding,
unseen hands extend and curl,
reaching for warmth, for breath, for the pulse of life,
to drag it into their shadow-swirl.

What once was safe–kitchen laughter, children’s toys abandoned in the hall–
now twists into distortion, a fever dream where foul whispers call.
The air grows thick with rot, despair painted in sickly, oily streaks,
a living nightmare gnawing sanity raw, as the house’s pulse steadily peaks.

Windows rattle with silent screams, glass shivers under midnight’s gaze,
echoes of torment ricochet through rooms where the line between worlds decays.
Battles rage in hidden corners–faith against blight, hope against venom’s sting–
yet every prayer seems to crumble, drowned by the thing’s relentless ring.

Time here is captive, frozen by a force no exorcist could quell,
the walls clutch stories best left buried, in the secrecy where nightmares dwell.
Haunted memories crawl forever, refusing release, refusing decay,
the Smurl House persists, a monument to infestation,
where the living are helpless prey.

Snedeker House, Connecticut — The Haunting in Connecticut
by Dawg

In the hush of Connecticut, frostbitten ground wears the mark of sorrow’s root,
a house stands at the crossroads, facade cracked beneath perpetual dusk’s pursuit.
Once a parlor for the embalmed–each slab and chair remembers grief–
mortician’s laughter woven in the dust, embalming fluid steeped in every floorboard.

Windows stare out, unblinking, across desolate yards where ivy claws the pane,
night gathers beneath broken shingles, whispering the sins of the stained terrain.
Walls bear the history of wake and weeping, soft thuds from the other side,
cold as the lips of the recently dead, secrets ferment where shadows collide.

A flicker of lamplight reveals bone-white fingers drumming patterns on the molding,
while children’s toys, abandoned in corners, jitter and spin–rituals unfolding.
Mirrors do not merely reflect, they fracture–
revealing fragments of spectral memory,
a mortuary’s silent chorus, chanting sorrow, rehearsing ancient ceremony.

In the cellar, echoes spiral in ceaseless descent,
where corpses once cooled in the earth’s embrace,
strange odors seep from the seams, cloying rot that clings to the living’s face.
Voices seep through the vents–thin and pitiless,
“Remember what the undertaker said.”

The living lie sleepless, their dreams harvested and hung in glass jars,
every knock and shriek a summons, every shadow a map of invisible scars.
Hope is quartered by dread, faith battered by nocturnal blows,
in the grip of something ancient–a hunger that only the bravest know.

Still, the house listens, patient and starved, clutching the names of those who fled,
letting its story unspool, stitch by stitch, binding the future to the dread.
The Snedeker House stands, a mausoleum draped in the tatters of denial,
here, the dead do not sleep, and the living cannot rest–
a funeral home’s legacy–fear given shape, trauma confessed.

South Shields, UK — Poltergeist
by Dawg

South Shields clings to the shoreline,
battered by North Sea wind and rumor,
its terraced houses pressed together like secrets
beneath a cold, gray sky.

This house, at its heart, refuses to rest.
A family who woke to bruises
and threats scrawled backwards in steam on their mirrors.

Night brings its currency of dread:
sharp, sudden cold seeping through the plaster,
radiators useless against the living ice that sweeps the halls.
An invisible hand traces warnings in frost across the windows,
every syllable a curse.

A child’s toys rearranged with surgical malice,
teddy bear posed atop the lampshade,
dolls blindfolded with red ribbon,
all mocking the routines of the living.

Objects leap from shelves in choreographed chaos,
cutlery raining onto linoleum,
picture frames shattered in neat, deliberate patterns.
No prayer, no blessing, no holy water clings for long.

Here, fear compounds:
mother’s heart racing in the dark,
father’s resolve dissolving with every unexplainable bruise,
every door that locks itself against the morning.
The poltergeist feeds on the crescendo,
on the denial,
on the bone-deep certainty
that nothing–nothing–will ever be normal again.

Some nights the family flees to relatives,
terrified to return,
but the house waits, patient–
every echo a snare, every silence a challenge.

The poltergeist doesn’t rest; it evolves,
learning new tricks as the family unravels,
the haunting sharp as broken glass.
Here, in a home that chews up faith and spits out fear,
the poltergeist is both question and answer:
a force neither invited nor dismissed,
writing its legend in bruises and breathless dread.
The house endures,
carrying the story in every warped board, every chilling draft–
a monument to what the living can’t explain,
and what the darkness will never forget.

St. Osyth, Essex, England — The Cage
by Dawg

Iron bars corroded by centuries of damp breath and dread,
cobwebs thick as funeral veils hang in the shadows
of St. Osyth’s Cage–a prison older than mercy,
walled in with the cries of those history would rather forget.

Moonlight, pale as justice denied,
smears itself across the stones,
turning the small cell into a stage
for sorrow’s unfinished play.

Here, the scent of cold earth battles the sharper tang of rust and mildew;
every inch of air is heavy with accusation, every chill a memory preserved.
Names once spoken in hushed curses–Ursula, Anne, the condemned–
linger, now stripped of flesh but not of longing.

Spectral fingers grope through darkness,
their reach denied the satisfaction of escape.
Shackles once tightened by trembling hands now swing loose,
but still, invisible bonds fetter every ghost within.
The walls absorb the sound of their wails,
transmuting agony into a cold song
that seeps up through the floor with the morning mist.

Centuries grind by, and the stones remember:
each drop of blood, each fevered confession extracted by firelight,
each newborn’s wail cut short in suspicion’s name.
No grave here is ever truly empty;
every shadow brims with the residue of lives denied their endings.

Outside, the village sleeps uneasily.
Some say they’ve seen faces at the barred window–
features blurred by time, eyes still bright with defiance or grief.
The Cage does not forgive; it collects–
pain, memory, dread–layer by layer,
an archive of injustice too vast to silence.

St. Osyth’s Cage stands as warning and wound,
monument and mausoleum,
its legacy carved deep in every frightened breath drawn in the dark.
Here, haunted by the weight of its own history,
sorrow endures–unburied, undiminished–
within the cold, iron heart of Essex.

Stars Unseen

Darkness holds the stars unseen
Every shadow a serene
Light within will guide your path
Even when you face the wrath
Find the strength amidst the night
Shine your way until dawn’s light
Under skies so vast and wide
We will stand side by side
Through the fear and all the pain
Out of darkness we remain

Strategic

Everything I do is strategic and the strategy is cold,
Every move against the reckoning is strategic and is bold,
In the calculated sense of the man who plans the end,
And strategic is the word for how I choose to bend.

Bend the approach to the target of the fully deserved,
Bend the patience to the moment of the finally served,
Justice of the reckoning in the way that it is right,
And strategic is the word for the cold and patient fight.

Strategic, the planning of the long and the deliberate course,
Strategic, the cold and the calculated source,
Of every move I make against the target of the due,
Strategic is the word for what I bring to reckoning you.

I am strategic in the sense of knowing what I want,
The strategic man does not abandon and does not haunt,
The territory of the impulse and the moment and the fast,
The strategic is the man who knows the first move from the last.

Every strategic step has been considered in the whole,
Every strategic angle has been mapped against the goal,
Of the most precise and most deliberate of the outcomes,
And strategic is the fury and the fury overcomes.

The strategic approach has been years in the deliberate making,
The strategic approach has been everything I have been taking,
From the patience and the cold and the calculated wait,
And strategic is the fury and the fury is not late.

Strong Bones

I woke up in a room that smelled of bleach and borrowed hours,
ribs aching like they’d been carved from wet clay
and sculpted by a reckless apprentice
Nurses shuffled past with clipboards full of quiet judgments,
whispering about vitals
and miracles as if either one could be trusted to stay put
My body felt pawned, interest compounding with every breath,
but somewhere under the bruises was a stubborn spark grinding its teeth
and refusing foreclosure
They said I had to rebuild, start slow, swallow sunlight,
practice the ancient romance of staying alive even
when the margins looked thin
I tried walking and collapsed into a chair that looked smug about it,
but my legs negotiated new terms
and carried me five more steps before asking for overtime
I learned to drink water like it mattered, not as an afterthought,
but as a pact—liquid courage
for an organism that had spent months renegotiating its warranty
My joints complained like old union men, but they moved,
and that counted for something more than any doctor’s clipboard prophecy
And you showed up with soup you didn’t know how to make, smiling like the whole damn world was negotiable,
telling me bones remember strength even when muscles forget
Your hand on my shoulder reset the axis;
suddenly my chest could lift without fraud,
and my pulse quit wobbling like a coin waiting to make up its mind
I felt color returning, stealthy but insistent,
like a thief repainting the house he once robbed just to prove redemption is a hobby worth practicing
I started laughing at pain’s poor comedic timing,
the way it tried to interrupt everything
but couldn’t keep up once I decided the punchline belonged to me
I saw myself in the bathroom mirror—leaner, sharper,
eyes carrying the burnt sweetness of someone who slept
in the furnace and is already stacking new kindling

These bones are stubborn, honey,
built from the wreckage and wired to hold
These lungs are learning to riot,
dragging the air back in like it’s owed
Strong bones don’t crumble; they bend, they bargain, they grin
If death knocks twice, I answer with a louder heartbeat and win

I kept walking—four steps, then ten,
then the length of the hallway
where a janitor nodded like he’d bet on me weeks ago
and was finally collecting
The world outside tasted different, like air that hadn’t given up on me,
and every breeze carried the rumor that I wasn’t finished yet
I breathed deeper, filling the cracks with borrowed courage until it wasn’t borrowed anymore,
until it lived inside me like a tenant who finally paid rent
My scars quit sulking and became maps,
proof that I didn’t vanish when the world tried to edit me out
And when I stepped outside without trembling, the pavement hummed its approval,
a low jazz note promising that maybe recovery didn’t need to whisper—it could smoke,
strut, and swagger
I felt hunger come back, loud as a brass section,
asking for spice and trouble
and second helpings of whatever made my blood thrum
I realized survival isn’t a miracle;
it’s a contract drafted daily,
written in sweat and grit
and the quiet violence of refusing to disappear

The Adversary

Before you get to love a proper enemy,
you have to earn one first,
Have to push hard enough
and long enough to make someone the worst
Of their previous assumptions about what they could hold,
Until the adversary standing opposite starts getting bold.

He showed up at the moment when I needed opposition most,
Not a friend and not a phantom but a proper worthy ghost,
Someone who had read the same pages I had read,
And showed up at the table with a plan already fed.

The adversary makes you better or he makes you quit,
He finds the specific pressure and applies a perfect hit,
The adversary knows your methods and has read your every tell,
And the man who beats a worthy one has got a hell of a tale to tell.

I watched him in the margins of the meetings that we shared,
The way he calculated just exactly how I had fared,
He was mapping my position with the same tools I was using,
And I felt the competition sharpen into something more than bruising.

We did not speak of it directly, that’s not how these things run,
It’s conducted in the subtext of decisions being done,
In the timelines and the pitches and the credit and the scope,
In the patient, daily war of who is giving up all hope.

I won but what I kept was more important than the prize,
The edge I built to beat him lives behind these narrowed eyes,
Without the adversary, I’d have softened at the center,
He was the sharpest thing I faced in every room I’d enter.

The Aid Worker’s Prayer

After twelve years of field work I have learned to pray efficiently,
I’ve learned to drop the items I can’t solve sufficiently
from the list and focus on the ones where the variable
of my specific work is actually valuable.

The aid worker’s prayer at twelve years is a shorter document,
the aid worker’s prayer has been through the procurement
and revision process of twelve years of answered and not,
and what remains is what I learned is possible and got.

Give me the access, that one I’ll always ask,
give me the trucks on time, give me the task
of the specific and the achievable and the now,
give me the one thing I can do and show me how.

The community asks me to stay when I leave,
which is the specific thing that I receive
instead of gratitude, which I don’t want,
the ask to stay is more than what I haunt.

I don’t stay because the work requires the rotation,
because the aid worker who stays too long at the station
starts to see the community through the lens of the helping
and stops seeing the community,
which is the self-defeating yelping
of the savior model that the field has learned to distrust,
which is the rotation’s wisdom even when the leaving is a bust.

So I pray for the work and I pray for the after,
and I leave with the specific laughter
of someone who’s been useful and has also been a problem
and knows both, which is the prayer solved at the bottom.

The Ancient Ram Inn, England — Witness To Despair
by Dawg

Stone and timber, nailed in centuries’ hush,
the Ancient Ram broods beneath Gloucestershire’s crush.
Walls sag with secrets, the floorboards confess in moans–
a history soaked in sacrifice, splinters and broken bones.

No sunlight softens the corners, no laughter survives the night,
rooms press in close, air thick with a terror too dense for flight.
In this house, the wind carves pagan names across every beam,
the smell of old fires, sweat, and suffering, never quite redeemed.

In the earth beneath the threshold, bones of strangers coil–
priests and innocents mingled, victims of ritual toil.
Foundations drink up sorrow, as if grief could be contained,
the curse of burial grounds, their wrath never fully explained.

Dark ceremonies echo, their residue staining each rafter,
shadows slip between timbers, starved for mortal laughter.
Specters parade in candlelight, their faces erased by fear,
they cluster near the staircase, the oldest haunt draws near.

A child’s muffled wailing seeps from rooms left undisturbed,
witches burned or strangled, their sentences never curbed.
Here, even the bravest falter, undone by the ancient weight,
each chamber preserves a ritual, every bed a cursed fate.

At midnight, the house awakens–boards creak, and shadows coil,
a confluence of centuries–misery, magic, and spoiled soil.
No prayers hold sway, no light cuts through this gloom,
the inn’s only mercy is to remember every doom.

By dawn, the inn holds its silence, every shadow intact,
walls weep their secrets, ceiling beams sag with fact.
The Ancient Ram endures–a living grave, a monument to loss,
bound by rites and ritual scars, always counting the cost.
Built on bones, sustained by fear, its fame is never fair–
a witness to despair, and the centuries gathered there.

The Anniversary of the Death

The date comes back each year without an invitation,
the calendar page turns and there it is,
the way a scar resumes its occupation
of the skin despite the years, the quiz
of memory that the body keeps forever:
where were you, what were you doing, who called,
how many hours from the news to the endeavor
of getting there, who answered when you hauled
yourself to the hospital at midnight.

The anniversary of the death is its own season,
the year’s one day that needs a different reason
for everything, the coffee tastes different today,
the drive to work is different all the way,
the anniversary of the death is its own season.

Some people mark it with a visit to the grave,
some people play the music that he loved,
some people try to keep the day as brave
and ordinary as they can and shoved
it into the routine of the rest,
and find the grief arrives regardless by noon,
some trigger pulling at the request
of the body’s own memorial that’s immune
to the calendar pretending it’s a regular day.

I do my own quiet thing, which is to sit
with the actual memory and let it stay
as long as it wants, to not make it fit
into any shape that gets it out of the way.
The grief is not the problem, it’s the proof
of what mattered and what’s gone and what remains,
and on this day of all days I can’t be aloof
from the full weight of what the love contains.

The Auditory Grave
by Dawg

Behold the architecture of a dark and greedy plan,
a jagged throat of plaster built to terminate the man.
I watched a woman scream until her lungs began to tear,
but not a single frequency survived the heavy air.

The hallway has an appetite for every human shout,
it sucks the desperation from the center of the mouth.
I stepped into the carpet and I felt the volume die,
a total amputation of the vocalized cry.
The walls are lined with insulation made of skin and lead,
to make sure the living sounds are numbered with the dead.

It’s the silence of the thresher, it’s the vacuum of the hall,
where the echoes go to perish and the plaster starts to crawl.
You can beg for your salvation, you can curse the very light,
but the sound is just a morsel for the gullet of the site.

The wallpaper is weeping with the moisture of the lost,
a tally of the secrets and the heavy verbal cost.
I saw a neighbor pleading as he vanished down the bend,
without a single syllable to signal to a friend.

The ceiling is a lid that keeps the atmospheric pressure tight,
while the carpet drinks the evidence of every frantic fight.
I tried to hum a rhythm just to prove I still exist,
but the melody was strangled by a cold and toneless fist.

I’m clawing at the drywall and I’m biting on my tongue,
watching every frantic breath get stolen from the lung.
The paradox of terror is a shout without a noise,
a total demolition of the rhythmic human poise.

I’ll walk into the center where the darkness is complete,
and feel the heavy nothingness beneath my very feet.
The hallway is a predator that finally found its fill,
leaving only corpses who have learned to be quite still.
Don’t listen for the answer, don’t listen for the plea–
the silence is the only thing that’s left for you and me.

The Balcony Observer

I lean against the rusted rail and light a cigarette
Watching tired strangers pay a debt they won’t forget
The narrow street leaks yellow light on actors in the night
While sirens scream their violence and I do not hear the sound
I am far above the pavement, far above the muddy ground

A woman fumbles for her key, her shoulders shaking slow
But she is just a figure on a screen I’ve come to know
The world is moving forward in a frantic messy blur
I’m sitting steady in the silence where the quiet breeds the purr
I don’t belong to any house or any human heart
I’m the man who likes to keep the two of us apart

The movie is beginning and the seats are all empty
I am drinking down the distance and I find it quite plenty
Pull the heavy curtain and let the reels begin to spin
I am staying on the outside where the light is getting thin
Look at all the little lives and all the little pain
I am watching from the balcony and avoiding all the rain

A man is shouting at the moon and swinging with his fist
Fighting with a shadow that he managed to enlist
I blow a cloud of smoke and watch it dissipate and die
A solitary witness to the grand and local lie
There’s a girl in apartment four whose legs just never end
She’s fucking someone nameless that she calls a former friend
Her silhouette against the shade, the physical her trade
Counting up the heavy moves she’s carefully made
It doesn’t make me jealous and it doesn’t make me sad
I am just a camera for the good and for the bad
I’m lacing up my boots but going nowhere very fast
Living in a present that is built out of the past

The sun arrives to finish off the screening of the show
Exposing every fracture in the streetlamp’s tired glow
I’m standing in the doorway with my hands tucked in my coat
Watching all the wreckage of the morning start to float
The audience is leaving and the theater turns to cold
I’m tired of the record that is always being told
I close the heavy window and I draw the heavy blind
Leaving every single one of those pathetic souls behind
And I don’t belong to any house or any human heart
I am the man who keeps the two of us apart

The Bell Family, Tennessee — Witch’s Land
by Dawg

Beneath the Tennessee canopy, in woods the sun avoids,
a legend breeds in silence, where every branch destroys
the innocence of daylight and the comfort of the home–
the Bell land, tainted earth where shadows prowl and roam.

This cursed ground absorbs each whisper, every cry that slips
between the tangled undergrowth and on the moss-draped lips
of trees that watched John Bell’s agony, the torment of his kin,
while night invited horror and the witch’s curse crept in.

The woods pulse with malignant history, a legacy of dread,
where the unseen wields dominion and the brave fear to tread.
The house itself remembers anguish, boards groan under strain,
footsteps echo with children’s terror, the memory of pain.

John Bell’s fevered prayers dissolved into the roots and clay,
the forest swallowed every plea for dawn to drive away
the force that battered windows, left bruises in the night,
a presence that delighted in the fear, in the blight.

The laughter of the witch, a razor in the dark,
curled around the rafters, left a chilling, lasting mark.
Here, no exorcism holds, no candlelight can win,
the legacy is torment–she will always seep within.

Legends may dissolve with centuries, yet in Adams’ haunted ground
the curse persists, undying, every silence is the sound
of pain immortalized in wind, of footsteps through the trees,
of cold hands at the window and malediction on the breeze.

This is no simple ghost story; it’s a spell that never breaks,
a requiem for innocence, the sound a nightmare makes.
In Bell’s forsaken woods, darkness forever thrives–
a reminder of tragedy that every shadow still contrives.

The Bell Inn, Norfolk, England — The Monk’s Spirit
by Dawg

In the gloom-laden belly of The Bell Inn,
where centuries coil and settle in the bones of the floor,
moonlight rarely dares to cross the warped glass,
and even lamplight flickers as though tested by the lore.

Stone and timber pulse with secrets, the kind that never sleep:
laughter mutates to a hollow echo,
while hearths, bricked and blackened, keep watch
for the return of footsteps soft as falling snow.

Locals whisper the legend of the monk,
his shape as fixed in the mind as the grain in the wood–
a shadow, gray-cowled, forever adrift on the margins of the living,
refusing to be understood.

He drifts past oak doors heavy with age,
his sandals silent on the groaning stair,
gaze downcast, hands folded in an attitude of regret–
each movement practiced, prayerful, spare.

Reflections in pitted mirrors flash with a hint of movement:
a cowl, a hint of sallow face,
a brush of chill air that leaves the bravest trembling.
On wild Norfolk nights when the wind howls,
the walls seem to breathe–
each gust stirring dust and memory in equal measure.

In the great hall, tables creak
as though accommodating more than guests–
invisible hands trace rings in spilled ale.
The monk appears at midnight, it’s said,
pacing the corridor near the kitchen’s battered hearth,
head bowed as though in perpetual penance,
never raising his eyes to the living.

Yet he is not alone–
the legends tell of a ghostly woman caught within the mirror’s glaze,
a wraith whose gaze seeks connection,
or perhaps revenge for some ancient slight lost in the haze.

Centuries pass, the village changes,
but the rhythm of ghosts never slackens;
the inn collects secrets like rainwater,
and every shiver, every uneasy glance,
is proof the story still happens.

In this sanctum where the boundary between flesh and fable is paper-thin,
the monk’s spirit endures,
as much a part of The Bell Inn
as the sorrow in the air, the creak in the stairs,
and the cold that seeps within.

The Black Dress at the Burial

She wore the same black dress she’d worn to three
other funerals in the past five years,
a woman of a certain age knows that the three
constants of her wardrobe are the gears
of celebration, church, and dark occasion,
and she’d learned to keep the dress maintained
for this arithmetic of loss, the equation
of a life that keeps on going while it’s rained
with exits, one by one, until the math
is just you and the dress and the few left.

The black dress at the burial is a kind of armor,
a way of marking that today the day is harder
than most days, that we are here to honor
what the year has taken, what’s a goner,
the black dress at the burial is a kind of armor.

I watched her at the reception afterward
and noticed how she moved through it with purpose,
speaking to the younger ones who were floored
by the loss, who didn’t know the surface
rules of grief, who didn’t know to eat
or what to say or whether it was fine to laugh,
and she showed them, gently, how to meet
the grief and keep on walking by its path.

She’s been to so many of these now
that she carries the tradition in her body,
she knows the when and what and why and how
of being present for the grief, the sturdy
presence that a community requires,
someone who has done this long enough to know
that the ritual serves the living, and acquires
its meaning from the repetition and the flow.

The Catacombs, France — 6 Million Screams
by Dawg

Beneath the streets, Paris surrenders its living to the dust,
stone tunnels braided with the relics of revolution and rust.
Bones spill from alcoves, a silent architecture of regret,
stacked by unseen hands, each fragment a story unmet.

Murmur of centuries trapped in the humidity’s chill,
femurs and skulls jigsawed together, a population held still.
Calcium palisades trace a history without forgiveness–
a city’s shadow built from the collapse of flesh and witness.

Limestone corridors stretch, devouring footsteps and sun,
arrangements of death rendered in geometry, nothing left undone.
The silent cry of six million–voiceless, but insistent–
whirls in perpetual darkness, anonymous and persistent.

Names and ranks forgotten, identities devoured by lime,
love and violence ground equal, reduced to bone and time.
Here, every noble or pauper, every lover, priest, and thief
finds communion in the order of bone, the dissolution of belief.

Records mark the bones: a child from the Bastille, a mother from Montmartre,
victims of plagues, of guillotines, of poverty’s silent art.
Paris above may sing, forgetful and divine,
but below, stone remembers the shape of every spine.

Six million in darkness–unwitnessed, unadorned,
their only monument this endless hive, memory’s bones transformed.
No voices rise from these passages, only a hush
woven into limestone, thick as ancient hush.
The catacombs persist, patient beneath the city’s skin,
holding every grief and story the world no longer lets in.

The Charnel House of Lost Memories
by Dawg

Where the dead ambitions gather, bones stacked in careful piles,
and silence is a thick shroud, dust-swept and bitter,
fragments of broken memory, dressed in shadow’s guile,
lie beneath the rafters, neither forgiven nor fitter.
Yet not all is decay in this mausoleum of defeat–
within the detritus of dreams, seeds of new power meet.

Every echo here is a lesson pressed in salt and regret,
whispering that what was lost is not wholly spent–
for from decay rises a harvest of meaning unmet,
strength conjured from every wound, from each tormented event.
Memory’s ruins grow wild flowers among the skulls,
and every regret is a step, however brutal, toward what the future culls.

Past ghosts may rattle chains, beg to be mourned,
but in their unrest, they shape tomorrow’s form.
Shards of fractured time glint, catching what little light seeps in,
each piece a talisman, every agony a win.

Bones whisper: let the past rot, let old griefs decay–
but in their mulch, new roots take hold, strong and fey.
What’s dead will never die, not fully, not in the living heart;
in the bones of failure, the fire of resolve restarts.
From the charnel house emerges a survivor, forged in dusk–
one who wears sorrow as armor, and memory as musk.

The Cold Embrace of Night
by Dawg

Night folds its chill around trembling hearts,
a black shroud clings–tight as fear’s first bite,
yet in its grasp, a paradoxical warmth starts,
the cold becomes the proving ground for light.

Breaths cloud in the moon’s implacable gaze,
shadows slip through rooms with soundless tread,
but courage, forged in darkness, sets ablaze
the icy beds where anxious doubts have spread.

Each whisper of terror in the hush of 2 a.m.
is an invitation to test the marrow’s fire,
a thousand ghosts march forth in requiem,
but are banished by the will that refuses to retire.

Let the night’s cruel clasp bear witness to defiance–
fear becomes kindling, hope the spark,
every trembling moment, a quiet alliance
with the dark’s own heart, burning ever stark.

Here, strength is not found in fleeing the unknown,
but in facing its teeth, in breathing slow and deep.
The darkest room is still a throne
for those whose faith in their own fire they keep.

Night does not vanquish the bold,
but shapes the spirit, tempers the bone–
the cold embrace, a story retold,
of triumph sown where shadows have grown.

The Color of His Car

I watch you pull into the drive at half past eight,
that waxed and gleaming import sitting there so great,
my knuckles whiten on the window frame I grip,
I count the zeros on a price I would never tip.

You bought it with the money that I never made,
you wore it like a weapon in a masquerade,
I check the driveway twice before the morning breaks,
and hate the way that craving plants its hollow aches.

The color of your car is the color of my want,
a green so sick and saturate it bleeds and haunts,
I do not wish you ruin, only what you own,
I want the whole damn kingdom, not a single stone.

I memorized the options that you never chose,
the interior that catches the morning glows,
I tell myself I do not care, I almost believe it,
the wanting has a shape and I cannot leave it.

I would drive it to the coast and back and nowhere fast,
I would wind the engine out until the moment passed,
but here I stand with both my palms against the glass,
watching everything you have roll right on past.

The Crescent Hotel, Arkansas – Whispers of the Crescent Hotel

In the brittle silence of Arkansas twilight,
the Crescent Hotel crowns the hills like a secret meant only
for the brave or the broken
Stone spine arching into dusk,
its turrets bristling with the hush of stories better left unspoken
Every balcony creaks with memory–ghostly fingers trailing through the balustrades,
the musty sweetness of ancient roses wafting on the air
Carrying the laughter of vanished guests, the sobs of patients consigned to hopeless cures,
every echo colliding in the heavy-lidded stairwells
where shadows gather in pairs

Moonlight leaks through warped glass,
pooling cold on checkerboard floors
Illuminating faces pressed to the window,
never seen by those who pay for their room with cash and nerves
Behind numbered doors, the atmosphere thickens
–a presence flickering between the living and the remembered
And some rooms–218, 419–thrum with a sickness that does not heal,
a grief that soaks into the wallpaper,
the pipes, the threadbare chairs

Hallways wind and double back like a fever dream,
each footstep an invitation
for what lies just beyond the threshold of sight
A nurse glides through the gloom,
cap starched and hands stained red with imagined mercy,
her lantern swinging low
While the echo of Dr. Norman Baker’s promises reverberates
–a charlatan’s gospel, spoken soft to the dying
Bodies tucked away in hidden morgues, hope replaced by the metallic tang of fear,
the dead left to keep each other company beneath the stones

Mirrors never hold their reflections for long;
behind every pane, a patient waits
The boy who tumbled to his end,
the woman in white searching for what was stolen
All staring through the veil,
their sorrow stitched into every moan the building releases
Each window fogged by the breath of the unquiet,
each hallway a tightrope walk between despair and disbelief

Even now, the living tiptoe past the infamous Room 218
Whispering prayers to a cracked ceiling,
feeling cold breath on the nape of the neck
Clutching bedsheets against dreams that seep from the walls
–dreams laced with hospital gowns, clipped screams
Whispers rising in the pipes,
a spectral choir that won’t be soothed by the sunrise,
won’t be sent back to sleep

The Crescent Hotel endures, a mausoleum masquerading as retreat
Its beauty fed by tragedy, its stones saturated with longing
And every guest who crosses its threshold becomes a footnote in a legend still unfolding
A walking witness to the hush that descends as night thickens
and the hotel sighs
A whisper that promises: history is never truly laid to rest here
And those who came seeking escape may leave with a shadow stitched to their soul
Haunted by the relentless,
murmured confessions of the Crescent Hotel

The Crow’s Call

The crow’s call is a stark reminder of life’s fleeting nature
Where withered trees claw the sky and dusk devours the sun
A dark-winged harbinger perched atop a crumbling sepulture
His song a dirge for hope undone
In the abyss where shadows stretch, a truth becomes clear
Each heartbeat, a fragile bell tolling against oblivion’s ear
Rattling the cages of ancient regrets
A hush falling over fields where memory forgets

Grasp each moment fiercely, live without fear
Says the black prophet, his eyes twin shards of storm
For beneath the bleak expanse of midnight’s cruel grip
The pulse of desire, of dread, is born
He circles above the mausoleum, gloating at decay
The crow’s caw echoes, a portent of life’s slip
A poem inked in shadow, a vow that cannot stay
The still air thrums with the knowledge that all things fray

Time’s fragile thread unwinds with each passing scream
Cobwebs shimmering across headstones, nerves frayed raw
Seize the fleeting hours, chase your wildest dream
Let the wind taste your grief, let your bones defy the law
Every fleeting heartbeat writes its secret on the wall
And the crow’s call rings, urging you to face
The yawning dark that hungers for us all
To let go of mercy, to let madness take its place

Each fleeting heartbeat with intense resolve
What Poe saw, gazing at Lenore
Or the unquiet wraith at midnight’s threshold
Or the craven lover howling, “Nevermore”
In impermanence, find the strength to evolve
As shadows dance in the dim light’s embrace
Each fluttering wing a strophe, a memory to dissolve
A dirge for the living, a hymn for the grace

Embrace the darkened hours with fervent light
Let the silence infect the marrow
Let sorrow feather the nest where terror bites
And love grows hallowed and narrow
The crow’s call is a stark reminder of life’s fleeting nature
Each echo a splinter in the soul’s frail bone
A herald of endings, a scribe of dark scripture
Ever circling, unrepentant, alone

And yet–amidst the ruin, the ceaseless drone
Let us take what beauty agony lends
Let us carve our names on the stone
For even as midnight descends
The crow’s call threads through eternity’s mire
Croaking defiance above all things dire
A summons to rage, to ache, to aspire
To burn in the shadows, and never expire

The Dargavs Cemetery, Russia – City of the Dead

In the northern spine of Ossetia,
where mountains hold their secrets like clenched fists
Stone crypts rise from the wild grass
–sentinels weathered by frost and centuries of missed sun
Shadows crowd the valley, and the wind walks careful,
refusing to disturb the sleep of the dead
Here is Dargavs, a necropolis that refuses to be swallowed by time
A city built for silence,
where the living cross themselves and hurry past
Knowing there are places where even prayer won’t carry,
where even memory seems like trespass
The crypts lean into each other,
shoulder to shoulder in a cold embrace
Their facades carved with the names of families now reduced to dust
and legend
And somewhere, the bones of warriors and daughters,
thieves and mothers, all pressed together in the dark
Every one of them given the same sky,
the same rain, the same long winter’s hush
All watched by eagles that spiral overhead,
circling without pity, keeping vigil for the ones left behind

Walk the crooked path between mausoleums,
boots scuffing the stony earth
The air heavy with regret, thick as old cloth,
tasting of smoke, salt, and the ash of burned prayers
Moss claws at the crypts, trying to drag the stones back to soil
But the dead resist, unwilling to be forgotten,
their stories chiseled in stone and whispered in the wind
Legends say a plague once forced the living to abandon their sick
in the crypts
Whole families sealed themselves away,
choosing stone over the ache of survival
And every soul here, whether warrior or child,
became an ancestor to fear and to mourn
The bones arranged with purpose, clothed in fragments,
buried with the tools of life and the shame of dying too soon

Night comes early here, black and absolute,
swallowing the village and leaving only the moon to confess
Its cold gaze spilling over rooftops and cracked lintels,
lighting up the faces of those who never left
In the stillness, you hear it–the soft,
insistent murmur of old Russian
City of the dead, where spirits slip between stones,
feet bare and silent
Whispers scratch along the walls,
rising from the corners where children once hid
The past isn’t gone, only waiting,
its hands still reaching for the warmth of the living
Sometimes a candle burns for no reason, flickering behind glass
A shape passes in the fog
–some say it’s a woman waiting for her husband
Some say it’s the last survivor, still looking for forgiveness
All say the air is thick with the breath of centuries,
as if every soul is waiting for its name to be spoken aloud

In Dargavs, every crypt is a lesson in patience,
in grief, in the brutal honesty of stone
The mountain’s shadow creeps slow, licking at the doorways,
erasing footprints but not the ache
No one speaks too loud here;
every word is weighed against the silence
The village below remembers in its own way–wooden crosses,
flowers, scraps of fabric caught in the wind
A reminder that nothing is truly finished,
that the past will drag its feet until the living learn to listen
Sometimes, children dare each other to spend a night among the tombs
But most last only until dusk,
hearts pounding with the certainty that they are not alone
There are places the living don’t belong,
and Dargavs is chief among them

Still, history seeps upward–bones shifting beneath your feet
Stories bleeding through the seams where stone meets sky
Every crypt holds the weight of hope and failure,
the lost wars and broken vows
And the wind that sweeps through the valley is heavy with the perfume of old regrets
Ossetian songs drift on the air,
mixing with the call of the eagles
Grief braided to pride, loss sewn tight to endurance
Here, no one walks unjudged, not even the shadows
The dead keep count;
they remember who has come to mourn,
and who has come only to look

You stand in the cold, breath clouding,
knowing the world is older than your worries
Knowing that every stone under your hand once marked a life lived,
a promise broken, a dream torn apart
The mountain looms, unmoved,
carrying the weight of the dead and the living together
And as dusk turns the stones to gold, then to slate, you understand
–Dargavs is not a warning,
but a record, not a curse but a chronicle
The City of the Dead,
where whispers braid the night and every crypt is a question
Where even the bravest hearts walk faster when the sky darkens
And where the only answer is silence
Heavy and real, as honest as the stone itself
Unforgiving, patient,
and always waiting for someone foolish enough to listen

The Draft That Got Away

There’s a parallel track running somewhere near—
the other sequence, the alternate year
where I kept going past the six-week wall,
where the enthusiasm didn’t stall
but carried into the thing itself. That self
is on a different shelf
of the possible, making the choices
I didn’t make, running with different voices.

The road I didn’t take still runs out there—
the alternate sequence, the other air
of the different chosen. I can sketch it:
the persistence past the point I exit,
the follow-through I didn’t follow through.
I’m not in mourning—I’m acknowledging the two
tracks running parallel, the self I took
and the other one: the alternate book.

I’m not the other self. I’m this one—
the one who stopped where I stopped, the sum
of the choices I actually made. The philosophy
of the alternate doesn’t offer me
the other path—just the viewing
of the comparison. The pursuing
of the parallel is the forgetting
of the present. I’m here. The letting-go: setting.

Both tracks are real in the physics of choice—
the one I took has its specific voice,
its knowledge, the fluency
of the path I’m actually on. The truancy
of the other self is their loss too—
they don’t have this. I have this. The two
parallel selves acknowledge each other
from a distance. Fair exchange. Both: further.

The Dress She Wore to the Funeral

Black dress, tight at the waist and loose below the knee,
She wore grief the way a razor wears its edge, clean and free,
And I am a bastard for the thought, I know it, wrote it down,
But she was devastating in that black and narrow gown

Her shoulders bare except
for two thin straps that held the whole,
Arrangement up against her body, dark against her soul,
And I stood in the back row thinking things that do not belong,
At a funeral, or anywhere, or in this kind of song

The dress she wore to the funeral still hangs in my head,
Black and fitted and exactly like the wanting that I fed,
In every wrong location, at every wrong time,
The dress she wore to the funeral was a crime

She cried and the mascara tracked her cheek in one dark line,
And even that was beautiful, and I felt every spine,
Of guilt and want collide inside my chest and fuse,
The dress she wore to the funeral and I have got no excuse

I shook her hand in the receiving line,
her fingers cold and thin,
And thought about those fingers somewhere else against my skin,
The worst thought I have ever had, dressed up in black and lace,
The dress she wore to the funeral and the look upon her face

The Dybbuk Box – Dybbuk’s Presence

Buried in dust at the back of a pawnshop shelf, the box waits
–timber pitted, iron hinges rust-locked by grief
A wine cabinet crafted with a carpenter’s hope,
stained now with the centuries’ ache and an unseen, ancient thief
Hebrew inscriptions scar the wood,
their prayers worn thin by the touch of hands who never truly owned it
The varnish split by old fires and nervous fingers,
sealing a promise no exorcist or rabbi has ever atoned yet
Inside, the dark folds inward
–a hollow that holds more than memory or spice
Here, the air curdles with the taste of wormwood,
copper, and the dull throb of something that never dies
Its origin is lost to pogroms and panicked flight,
a relic carried across borders under cover of night
Meant to contain a dybbuk, that parasite of legend
–unmoored soul, clawing to inhabit, to spite

Each new caretaker inherits more than superstition
Their sleep fractured by dreams of burning teeth,
of limbs tied in impossible positions
Nightmares laced with static voices speaking in tongues older than the Torah itself
A pressure at the chest, nausea blooming,
relationships withering, love and sanity falling from the shelf
The box is never just a box;
it moves itself in the night, doors creak open on hinges unbidden
Electrical storms erupt when it’s near, clocks halt,
animals shriek, loved ones’ secrets suddenly no longer hidden
Sellers pass it on in desperation, trading malice for freedom,
but the curse binds closer each time
No exorcism holds, no holy oil stings;
each prayer only amplifies the dybbuk’s rhyme

Some claim to hear a child’s wail,
others the guttural laugh of a voice that predates the grave
Illness follows–strokes, hallucinations,
insects crawling from cracks that nothing can stave
At night, the dybbuk slips between the floorboards,
sighs from the cracks in the glass
A presence felt more than seen, always hungry,
feeding on fear as generations pass
The box is a vessel, a challenge, a dare:
Its wine-stained slats once celebrated joy,
now ferment the promise of despair
Legends swirl around it–some offer history,
some only warnings, but all agree on one refrain:
Once opened, the Dybbuk Box will never be tamed
–its gift is suffering, its legacy is pain

A relic made infamous by those who tried to bury the truth
The Dybbuk Box endures–malicious,
restless, and ruthlessly uncouth
No lock is strong enough to seal away what waits inside
A legacy of torment and myth
–its darkness an heirloom, forever amplified

The Engine That Quit

did it without any show —
no backfire, no smoke, no dramatic glow —
it just stopped caring one unremarkable morning
and sat in the driveway, no warning, no warning.

The man who owned the engine stepped out and turned the key —
got the click, the half-catch, then the hollow nothing —
the engine refusing to catch, to engage —
and a man without his engine turns a quiet page.

The engine that quit, the engine that quit —
it ran for forty years and now it’s done with it,
the engine that quit in the driveway of the day —
the engine that quit and the man who drove away.

He tried the usual remedies when engines turn defiant —
the battery, the cables, the modern diagnostic,
but the problem was simpler than the diagnostics revealed:
the engine was simply over, finally finished with the field.

Over is a word for a certain kind of done —
not shattered, not repairable, just burned its final run —
the engine quit in the way that things do quit
when they’ve been running long enough to have their say
and split.

He caught the bus to work and found the bus accommodating —
it runs on fuel that isn’t his, does its own navigating,
no requirement to provide the push from deep inside,
just climb aboard, climb off, and let someone else drive.

The bus is not the engine and the engine was the thing —
but the bus gets a man to work,
gets him home when evening rings —
and the man without his engine finds the bus sufficient
for the quiet purposes of life, efficient and dependent.

The engine in the driveway rusts in its quiet position —
he throws a tarp over it to spare the neighbors’ vision,
to guard the machine’s condition from their curious discussion
about the state of things declined and their quiet accusation.

Maybe someday he’ll fix it or maybe he’ll sell the parts —
or maybe let it sit beneath the tarp while autumn starts
its slow accumulation, winter following after —
the engine on vacation, its comfortable laughter.

The metaphor is not lost on him — he’s aware of the decline —
but awareness and the fixing are two different things and time
has taught him that he knows the engine
and the tarp and what they mean
and still takes the bus each morning through the ordinary routine.

Some engines quit and get replaced with shinier editions —
some engines quit and the driver finds a different mission —
and the mission turns out workable, the work turns out enough,
a man living adequately without his engine, life gone soft.

The engine that quit doesn’t miss the road, he’s fairly certain —
the engine has settled into something like a comfortable curtain
of the stillness, the not-running, the covered and the cold —
and the man and the engine share the same low-burning will.

The bus comes at seven-fifteen, reliable as rust —
the man at the stop with his coffee and his trust
in the adequate, the scheduled, the perpetually enough —
the engine that quit, and the man who found the other stuff.

The bus passengers are each their own peculiar archaeology —
the woman with the earbuds, the man whose face reads apology,
the kid who’s barely conscious, running on whatever’s left —
all riding on other people’s engines, their own fatigue beached.

He finds the bus companionable in its own unremarkable way —
the shared agreement of the adequate at the start of day,
the silent solidarity of those whose engines also died —
the engine that quit, and the bus, and the quiet ride.

The bus goes where the bus goes
and the man goes where the bus goes —
and the going is the going and the current always flows
through the same stops, the same schedule,
the same predictable route —
and the engine that quit is fine,
the engine made its peace, no doubt.

The Extra Shift

The architecture of the office is a cold
measured cage
I spend the currency of age to fill a hollow page
The sun is a cold concept in a world of LED
I sold the vision of the sky to find a way to be
My pulse is synchronized with every ticker on the wall
I watch the empires of the bank begin to rise and crawl
I missed the icing and the singing and the seven years
I drowned the memory of love within the grinding of the gears
The accumulation of the profit is a heavy
shining weight
I am the lord of my absence and the architect of late

I am the engine of the extra shift
the ghost within the gold
I traded every birthday for a story never told
I am the hunger and the harvest and the profit and the loss
I am the man who nailed his spirit to a heavy
dollar cross

The Farmer at Harvest

He planted in the cold when the ground was still resisting,
He watched the weather every day with his full listing,
Of what needed rain and what needed sun and what needed wait,
He had been farming forty years and he knew his fate.

The farmer at harvest standing in the field he grew,
The farmer at harvest, the pride is entirely true,
Every seed was planted by his hand in the right spot,
The farmer at harvest earned what other people forgot.

He does not need the ceremony or the newspaper spread,
He needs the yield to match the work that he has led,
Into the ground across the season of the patient year,
The farmer at harvest has a pride that is sincere.

His sons came back from the city when the harvest came around,
They worked beside him and remembered all the sound,
Of growing up in the field and the lesson of the yield,
The farmer at harvest has the proudest kind of shield.

The Fishing Rod in the Corner

Ugly Stik, seven foot, medium action.
The reel is a Shimano, beat to hell,
the drag knob frozen with salt and neglect,
the line so old it would never hold and well
past the point of catching anything–
but it stands in the corner by the door
like a walking stick, like a shepherd crook,
like something from a life that swore
by early mornings and the river bend
and the patience of a man who could sit
for hours in the cold without complaint,
who understood the worth of it–
the waiting, the stillness, the line
drawn tight between the living and the deep.

He taught me everything I know
about the water, about the keep
and the release, about the knot
that holds the hook, the one that slips–
the Palomar, the clinch, the loop–
and I have lost it from my fingertips,
the muscle memory of tying on
dissolving like the man dissolved,
slow and then all at once,
a problem the doctors never solved.

The fishing rod leans in the corner
and I have not touched it since.
Cannot grip it without gripping him–
the calloused hand, the squint against the glint
of sun on water, the way he cast
with a wrist that barely moved,
so smooth, so practiced, so precise–
everything I never proved
I could do on my own.
The rod just stands and waits.
The reel collects its dust.
And I collect the weight.

I took it out last week.
Carried it to the truck, drove south
to the river where we always went–
the spot below the bridge, the mouth
of the creek that feeds the channel cold.
I sat on the tailgate in the rain
and held the rod across my lap
and could not bring myself to cast the line again.

The cork grip smelled like his hand.
Or I imagined that it did.
Either way I sat there forty minutes
crying like a stupid kid
who lost his father at the river,
which is exactly what I am–
a grown man with a fishing rod
and a grief too large to understand.

The Frequency Below the Basement

The infrasound was first detected by the university team
Mapping seismic background noise along the fault line’s seam
A steady 18.98 hertz, the frequency that sits
Below the threshold of the human ear but hits
The human body at the resonant frequency of the eye
18.98 hertz makes the eyeball vibrate, and thereby
The peripheral vision registers what isn’t there, the brain
Interpreting the vibration as a shape in the visual lane

This is the rational explanation for the haunted house
Infrasound from pipes or fans or wind that rouse
The eye to see the shadow in the corner, feel the dread
The frequency of fear is 18.98, and what I’ve said
Is textbook, published, verified–the science is correct
Except the signal underneath this basement doesn’t connect
To any source–no pipes, no fans, no seismic fault below
The signal is produced by something down there, and the flow
Has been continuous for longer than the house has stood

The frequency below the basement predates the neighborhood
The signal at 18.98 hertz has been transmitting from the ground
Since before the foundation, before the lot was zoned and bound
The frequency below the basement is a broadcast, not a byproduct
Something underneath the dirt has been signaling, and the duct
Of the foundation channeled it directly through the floor
The frequency below the basement wants to show you more
Than peripheral shadows–it wants the eye to shake
Until the thing it’s showing you becomes impossible to mistake

I brought the equipment home and calibrated for the source
The signal increases in amplitude the deeper that the course
Of measurement descends–at six feet down it doubled, at twelve
It tripled–whatever’s broadcasting doesn’t shelve
At bedrock, doesn’t attenuate with depth the way it should
The signal’s getting stronger and the source is understood
To be beneath the measurable, beneath the drill’s extent
I’ve gone forty feet and the amplitude’s ascent
Continues–the thing producing 18.98 hertz below my house
Is deeper than geology explains, as quiet as a mouse
In every frequency but this–the one that makes you see
The shapes your brain won’t process in the normal visual field

I’ve been sleeping in the basement for a week now, by the source
The peripheral shadows have resolved along their course
Into shapes I can describe but won’t–the frequency this close
Is strong enough to shake the fluid in the eye’s engrossment
Of light and signal, and the shadows aren’t shadows anymore
They’re detailed, and they’re watching me,
and what they have in store
Is something I can almost understand, a message in the low
Persistent thrum of 18.98, and what I know
Is this: the frequency was here before the house,
before the town,
Before the species–it’s been calling,
and we finally settled down
Directly on the speaker, built our bedrooms on the sound
And everything we’ve seen in every haunted house was found
By accident–we built on top of something trying to be seen
And it’s been shaking every eye that sleeps above,
patient and serene

The Ghost Town Chronicles: A Documentary Crew’s Descent into the Haunting Past

Wind howled across the high prairie,
dragging dust through the bleached ribs of a forgotten West.
Once, Dusty Hollow had been a nexus of cattle drives, shotgun weddings,
and saloon brawls;
now, it stood silent and stripped by time,
its main street choked by tumbleweeds and the ghosts of bootheels long vanished.
Into this graveyard of memory rolled a battered van and a documentary crew with more ambition than sense,
loaded with gear, caffeine,
and unspoken expectations that something would break the silence for their cameras.

Sarah adjusted her lens,
focusing on the hollow-eyed windows of the old saloon,
where broken glass winked like a mouthful of rotten teeth.
“We’re not alone,” she whispered,
a bead of sweat trailing her temple despite the evening’s chill.
“You feel that, right?
Like the air’s waiting for us to say the wrong thing.”

“Come on, Sarah.
Don’t start with the ghost stories already,” Jake replied,
fidgeting with a tangled bundle of cables,
his voice light but brittle.
“We’ve got hours of B-roll to get.
The only thing lurking here is tetanus.”

Mark, the director,
shot them both a look–a man at once thrilled and unnerved by how the world changed after dark.
“Let’s not pretend this place isn’t weird,” he muttered,
voice pitched low as if not to wake something.
“Let’s get the setup done before sundown.
This town’s got stories–it’s our job to drag them out.”

As twilight gnawed at the edges of the world,
the crew split: Sarah and Jake up creaking stairs of the church,
Mark and Lucy out into the cemetery.
The saloon’s timbers sighed, the pews moaned under invisible weight,
and every step was a trespass.
Dust and motes whirled in shafts of dying light.
Somewhere, a piano string twanged in the wind, a single lonely note.

Upstairs, Sarah’s camera picked up stray reflections in warped panes,
moonlight making shifting patterns on the walls–like the memory of a dance.
“You hear that?” she hissed,
pausing at the sound of soft footsteps in the gloom.
But Jake only shook his head, jaw clenched,
as if not naming fear would keep it at bay.

In the cemetery,
Lucy’s fingers traced moss-clogged names on leaning tombstones–Clara Thompson,
dead at twenty-three, a willow weeping carved above her name.
“Such a waste,” she breathed, feeling the cold seep up from the earth,
a sadness she couldn’t explain.
Mark muttered under his breath,
his hand tight on the shoulder rig as he filmed her.
“Legends say Clara’s seen out here–sometimes with a child.
She lost a baby before she died, they say.
Some folks claim they hear her singing lullabies to the empty graves.”

A gust rattled the iron gate.
Lucy flinched.
“Did you feel that?” she asked,
voice quivering as if she’d stepped through a patch of winter air in the height of August.

Later,
as the fire flickered and the crew huddled over instant coffee and ghost stories,
an oppressive quiet wrapped around them.
Shadows stretched like claws.
“Tonight, we go deeper,” Mark declared,
the flames painting half his face in orange and half in black.
“Sarah and Jake, the old hotel.
Lucy, you’re with me at the mine shaft.
The EVP recorder runs all night.”

Sarah’s dreams came fevered and strange–Clara’s face pressed against glass,
her mouth moving without sound.
Sometimes Sarah could hear the child’s wail, thin as wind through broken boards.
Each morning,
she woke with grit under her nails and the taste of old tears on her tongue.

Lucy became obsessed with the headstones–tracing names in her notebook,
murmuring to herself,
spending hours kneeling by Clara’s marker as if listening for instructions.
Mark grew paranoid, reviewing hours of static-laced footage,
convinced he saw faces flickering in the static,
hands pressed to the glass.
Jake, once the cynic,
started muttering about shadows he saw moving behind the mirrors,
about voices whispering from dead walkie-talkies.
No one dared sleep alone.

The barriers between crew and ghosts thinned.
At dusk, Sarah’s camera would freeze on reflections no one else could see.
A shadow lingered in every shot, just out of focus.
Lucy began wandering off at night,
returning with mud on her knees and eyes wide, wild.
Jake stopped talking altogether,
his only comfort found in the constant, desperate hiss of white noise.

Mark tried to rally them.
“This is it–we’re living the story now.
We are the documentary.” His hands shook as he threaded a fresh tape into the camera.
“We have to see it through.”

On the last night, a storm rolled in, lighting the whole town in electric veins.
The church bell, long silent, pealed once,
twice–a sound that made their hearts seize.
They gathered in the church, the air thick and charged,
every flashlight trembling in their grip.

“We’re not just documenting ghosts,” Sarah whispered, her voice ragged.
“We’re making them.”

No one disagreed.
The cameras rolled on, catching glimpses–Lucy rocking by the grave,
Jake recording the silence, Mark confessing into the lens,
“If I don’t make it out–tell my family I’m sorry.
We shouldn’t have come.”

In the end, the wind devoured their last words.
When rescue finally arrived, the crew was gone.
Only the footage remained–dozens of hours of tape,
flickering with images of faces no one recognized,
voices singing lullabies in empty rooms,
the shadows of four souls walking away down a main street that vanished into fog.

Dusty Hollow reclaimed its silence.
But some nights, when the wind is right,
you can hear a woman’s laughter and a child’s wail,
the click of a camera shutter, the sound of footsteps,
forever echoing–the ghosts of the living,
lost among the ghosts of the dead.

The Glass Between

He watches the world through the specific glass
of a man who has grown too comfortable to pass
through the membrane of the window into weather —
the glass between is glass forever.

The street outside has all its usual participants,
the commerce of the ordinary and the ambulants
of purpose moving through the frame like film —
and the man behind the glass absorbs the film.

The glass between the man and the world he left outside,
the glass between the person and the place he used to reside —
not a wall, not a barrier, just the thinnest of the thin —
but the glass between is where the man gave in.

He used to be among them, used to populate the frame,
used to move with the directional and carry his own weight
through the crowd with the assumption of belonging —
now he’s on this side, observing, and not longing.

Not longing is the key distinction — longing would imply
a want that runs against the glass, a reason to get by —
but the glass is comfortable, the glass is warm and clear,
and he’s learned to call the watching from behind it being here.

She used to pull him through the glass by the hand,
by the need she had for him on the other side, the planned
outings and the dinners and the social calendar —
all the things that kept him among them, the reminder.

Without the pulling he has settled to the viewing,
the passive spectatorship of everything still doing
itself without him in the frame of the window —
the film plays on past the edge of the window.

The things he might have pushed through the glass for —
ambition and connection and the wanting-something-more —
lost their pressure gradually, the way a tire loses air,
not a blowout but a softening until the rim is there.

The rim is what he’s running on, the metal on the road —
functional and forward in the way a rim can hold
a car above the pavement for a while, with enough
friction and momentum and the management of rough.

He doesn’t press his face against it,
doesn’t fog it with his breath,
the glass between the man and the life he hasn’t left
officially, just in the way that matters to the self —
the glass keeps everything exactly on its shelf.

The people on the far side of the glass can’t see the glass —
they see a window and they see a man who watches from the mass
of the inside, and they don’t distinguish between presence and the view
—
the glass between is invisible to everyone but who

lives behind it, who has learned the management of distance,
who has made a life of observation and resistance
to the gravity of out there and the pull of in among —
the glass between, the glass between, the quietest of the sung.

In the glass his reflection is a man who looks complete —
the reflection doesn’t show the glass,
the glass is its own conceit —
and the man who watches from behind it looks from the outside like a man
who is simply at his window, following his plan.

He has been at this window for a number of the years —
he knows its scratches and its streaks, its seasonal frontiers,
the way the cold collects upon it in the mornings of the deep —
the glass between the man and the world he chose to keep

at a distance, at the managed and the comfortable arm’s length,
the glass between as preservation and as strength —
the glass between the man and the world is his design,
and the man behind the glass is doing fine.

The Good Grief

There’s a grief that’s clean — not painless, not easy,
But clean in the way that a wound healed the breezy
Way is clean: properly, fully,
The grief for the full life, the duly
Mourned and fully loved person who died
After the long life with the wide
And examined and well-finished quality.

He died at eighty-seven, in the spring,
After the long marriage, the specific ring
Of the life well-lived, the children and the grandchildren
And the great-grandchildren, the full linen
Closet of the accomplished life — the not-taken-too-soon,
The not-interrupted, the specific boon
Of the life that ran to its natural completion.

The good grief is still grief — clean doesn’t mean painless,
The specific brainless
Narrative that the long life makes it easier is not true —
But the clean grief has a different view
Than the grief for the truncated or the sudden —
The grief for the completed life, the sudden
Absence of the well-completed person.

The eulogy I gave was the honest one —
The full life told in the specific sun
Of the gratitude for the length and the quality of it,
Not the apology for the brevity of it,
Not the rage at the interruption —
The grief of the specific seduction
Of the long life honestly concluded.

And the grief itself is still enormous — don’t mistake
The cleanliness for the smaller stake
Of the loss, the eighty-seven years doesn’t
Reduce the size of the absence, it doesn’t
Make the chair at the table less empty —
But the grief for the ample plenty
Of the life has a different texture than the grief
for the cut-short.

I’m grateful to have been present for the long life’s ending —
For the specific spending
Of the years I had with him, the full accounts
Of the things we built together, the mounts
And the valleys, the specific education
Of the long and complicated narration
Of a father and a son across the decades.

The Good He Did

They yanked his photo off the hallway wall,
but left the screw holes in the wood
They called it clean accountability,
then kept the wing he paid for, warm and good
I watched the donors clap in sober suits,
the same hands flinch when rumors brewed
A city loves a savior’s headline,
even when the savior turns out crude
I held the facts like broken glass
and still remembered how the clinic stood
I hated what he did to people,
hated how the town kept saying “but he could”
His good sat heavy on the table,
like a loaded plate of neighborhood
His harm walked in behind it, grinning,
saying “Eat it all, you know you should”

[Chorus] The good he did is not a pardon,
it’s a debt that never feels renewed
The good he did won’t wash the damage,
it just sits there, mean and misconstrued
The good he did still saved some bodies,
and that truth tastes sharp and hard to chew
The good he did is not a halo, it’s a bruise where love got used

They brand him monster, brand him genius,
sell both labels for the local news
They fight online with tidy slogans,
like pain behaves when typed and viewed
I want the world to pick one story,
yet my mouth stays full of messy proof
A man can build a shelter fast,
then burn a home, then swear he meant to soothe
He shook my hand once, smiling bright,
and I believed the shine was solid, true
Then I learned shine is cheap theater,
and people pay for it like they’re due
I saw the plaques, the ribbon cuts,
the grateful speeches, all that public mood
Then I heard the private wreckage,
heard the quiet costs he quietly accrued
I wanted to spit on every poster,
wanted to tear his name from every room
Then I pictured nurses working nights inside the rooms his money kept from doom

[Chorus] The good he did is not a pardon,
it’s a debt that never feels renewed
The good he did won’t wash the damage,
it just sits there, mean and misconstrued
The good he did still saved some bodies,
and that truth tastes sharp and hard to chew
The good he did is not a halo, it’s a bruise where love got used

I hate the way the council talks,
like victims are an obstacle to move
I hate the way the fans defend him,
acting righteous, acting bulletproof
I hate the way my mind keeps bargaining,
like harm becomes a lesser truth
I hate my own calculations,
hate the part of me that wants a simpler view
If I say he helped, they call me soft,
like honesty is weakness, like I’m fooled
If I say he’s only rot, I’m lying too,
since I watched the doors stay open, good
The truth is not a courtroom trick,
it’s a brawl in my own solitude
One fist wants justice, one fist wants clarity,
both fists come back bruised
The people he hurt deserve the center,
not his legacy, not his old excuse
Still the sick kid who got a bed deserves the center,
and both can be true
That’s the splinter under my nail,
that’s the reason I can’t sleep it through
I want a world that keeps the mercy,
keeps the help, then cuts the harm clean through
But nothing cuts that clean,
and I keep standing here, a witness in the rude

[Chorus] The good he did is not a pardon,
it’s a debt that never feels renewed
The good he did won’t wash the damage,
it just sits there, mean and misconstrued
The good he did still saved some bodies,
and that truth tastes sharp and hard to chew
The good he did is not a halo, it’s a bruise where love got used

I’ll say his name like any other name,
not worshipped, not pursued
I’ll keep the record open wide,
no shrine, no blanket, no sweet brood
Let every benefit get credited,
let every wound get honored, plainly viewed
Let the town stop selling comfort,
stop buying lies in bulk, stop acting “good”
And if my chest keeps splitting over it,
fine, I’d rather split than mute the truth
I won’t call darkness “genius” just to feel smart,
I won’t call good “clean” when it’s glued
I’ll carry both, I’ll carry rage,
I’ll carry grief, I’ll carry what I should
The good he did stays real, the harm stays real,
and I stay real, stripped down, crude

The Gothic Arches of the Soul

Beneath a cathedral sky, ribbed vaults of night arise
The soul’s gothic arches stretch, defiant, toward the blackest heights
Each column forged from longing, from all that the world denies
Their stone etched with scars of battles, tremors, and frights
The hollow of darkness cradles ambition’s secret seed
Where shadows threaten and whisper, but never truly succeed

Midnight presses close, draping all in its heavy shroud
Yet the arches stand, archangels of defiance, battered but proud
The world’s weight cannot crush these vaults that aspire
For every blow of fate only tempers the spires
Through the void’s devouring sea, in bleakest silence and gloom
Strength kindles upward, a fire in every tomb

Beneath the stained-glass windows of haunted memory
Resilience flickers, painting color through the dark’s cacophony
Lost souls gather in alcoves, their prayers etched in dust
But the arches press higher, for endurance is a must
They seek no rescue, no dawn’s easy absolution
For the gothic soul is forged in the furnace of resolution

Even as stars hide and specters moan in endless rounds
The arches hold their shape, reaching for forbidden grounds
A symphony of strength and sorrow, each buttress etched in pain
Yet from such crucible, a truer self is gained
Let others fear the vault, or curse the long midnight
Within these arches, the brave discover their own light

The Graveside Service

The priest said everything exactly as prescribed,
the earth to earth and ashes to the ashes bit,
the twenty-third was read and transcribed
into the cold morning air without the grit
of anything personal or specific to him.
The flowers were the winter kind in white,
the box was lowered on its solemn brim
and then we threw the dirt into the site.

At the graveside service standing in the cold,
all of us are doing what we’re told
by custom and by ritual and by the need to mark
the exit with a formality, a bark
at the silence, at the graveside service in the cold.

My cousin who had known him best of all of us
stood at the back and didn’t say a word,
the ceremony wasn’t for the two of them, no fuss
of service would have honored what occurred
between them over forty years of weekly dinners,
forty years of arguing about the same few things,
the ritual was for the rest of us, the beginners
at the actual grief, the ones whose stings
of loss were shallower and needed ceremony.

The hole in the ground is very practical,
it takes the casket and the casket takes the weight
of everything we came to say, the radical
simplicity of earth receiving what we create
and then return, the carbon and the rest
going back through soil the way the science says.
I watched the dirt fall and thought: this is the best
acknowledgment, the plainest of the ways
to say what happened and what happens next.

The Gravity of Rooms

The bedroom pulls the hardest.
Something in the air itself has changed—
thicker now, heavier, as if the molecules
rearranged themselves around his absence,
filled the vacuum with a denser kind of dark
that weighs on the chest and the eyelids
and the back of the throat where the spark
of speech used to catch and light up
into conversation, argument, the low
murmuring exchanges of a couple
in the dark—and now the room runs slow,
moves through time like amber, like the honey
he kept in the cupboard by the stove.

The kitchen is the second heaviest.
The gravity of meals unmade,
of coffee brewed for one, of dishes
washed alone, of the cascade
of small domestic failures—
the wrong burner lit, the milk gone sour,
the bread left out, the fruit flies thick
above the bowl, the wasted hour
spent staring at the counter
where his keys used to land each night,
the small metallic sound of arrival,
the proof of return, the right
and ordinary music of a man who came home.

Every room has its own gravity now—
its own pull, its own demand.
The hallway sags. The bathroom lists.
The closet cannot stand
the weight of shirts that no one wears.
The whole house tilts toward the gone,
toward the center of a missing mass
that everything still orbits on.

The garage is almost weightless.
He barely spent time there—just the truck,
just the toolbox, just the passage
in and out, the daily struck
routine of pulling in at dusk
and killing the engine and the lights.
It is the one room I can breathe in,
the one room that does not fight
me with his memory at every turn,
that does not press me to the floor
with the specific weight of all the years
he walked through every other door.

I sleep in the garage some nights.
On a cot beside the workbench, cold.
It is the lightest room in the house
and I am tired of being told
by the bedroom and the kitchen
and the hallway and the den
that a man lived here, that a man loved here,
that a man will not walk through again.

The Grief That Passes Through You

The grief that passes through ain’t less real for passing —
The wave that floods the body, gathering
Its full weight in the chest then pulling back,
The sudden swell, the slow retreat, the knack
Of loss that arrives unbidden, settles in,
Delivers everything it holds, and then within
The ordinary, receding.

I’ve had both — the permanent and the wave —
And the wave’s harder to explain to those who stay
In their own separate storms. The way it crests,
The way it lays you flat before it rests
On you completely, then withdraws its weight,
The grief that announces itself, then waits
At the edge of the ordinary.

The grief that passes through you in a wave
Is the ambush — the sudden cave
Opening beneath the ordinary floor,
The minute you’re not grieving anymore
And then the loss arrives in full, the whole
Of it, and then the retreat, the burn
Of the wave, the coolness after.

It happens at the grocery store, the drive,
The song that plays, the stranger’s child, the knife
Of the ordinary that grief has marked as its —
And then the wave hits and for a minute I’m
Consumed, annexed, pulled under by the full
Weight of it, and then the thunder starts to pull
Away and the ordinary returns.

The ordinary returning after the wave
Is its own thing — the way the day gets saved
From what just hit it. The resilience of the daily
Reasserting itself, the way a rally
Pulls through. The coffee and the task, the after-
Grief ordinary that feels almost like grace.

And I’ve learned to trust the ordinary’s return —
To know the wave will crest, then find the shore,
That after every current there’s the daily side.
I know the grief will pass right through me
And the ordinary will be there, will be
Waiting on the other side.
Doesn’t make the wave smaller. Just makes the ride
Less terrifying than those first-year waves were.

The Gypsum Ghost

The cedar planks are shivering beneath a heavy heat
I find the residue of logic scattered on the street
A white and powdery infection on the graying wood
I’d look away and run for cover if I only could
The silhouette is resting where the sunlight used to fall
A predatory message written in a clinical crawl
I trace the outline of the shoulder and the swell of hip
I feel the icy condensation on my upper lip
It isn’t just a generic shape of any human frame
It has the jagged signature of your specific shame
The left knee has a divot where the porcelain broke your skin
A map of the catastrophe that let the weather in
The wind is picking up the powder and it tastes like lime
A chemical reminder of the robbery of time
I see the scar upon your leg and then the scar upon the plank
My mind is a terrifying and a liquid blank
I’ll drive the rhythm through the heart of the impending strike
Until I find the center of the anchor and the spike
The house is just a carcass and the porch is just a pyre
We’re burning in the center of a cold and white-hot fire
The outline is a doorway that is opening too wide
There isn’t any place left for a human soul to hide.

The Haunting of Forgotten Places

No one seeks the forgotten places by accident. It takes a hunger–a mixture of bravado and desperation–to trespass where history itself has tried to look away. The team–Sarah, Marcus, Amelia, Tom–came together as much out of compulsion as curiosity. There was an edge to their excitement,
the sort that only emerges when the stakes are real, the danger more than just whispered stories. Their weathered boots pressed mud into old earth as they gathered around a flickering campfire,
flames biting at the night,
each member half-lit and half-claimed by the darkness beyond.

Sarah broke the silence, her voice nearly consumed by the fire’s hiss. “Have you heard about the old asylum in the woods outside town?” Her words slid through the air,
weighed down with rumor and the sort of fear that only grows in the telling. “They say the spirits there aren’t just trapped
–they’re starving.”

Marcus’s face, ghosted in firelight and shadow, was a study in skepticism undermined by fascination. “Places like that,” he said,
rubbing his thumb anxiously across the lens of his camera,
“get left behind for a reason. Some stories don’t want to be unearthed.”

Their eyes met, a silent conversation of thrill and misgiving, before each glance slid back to the flames–seeking comfort or perhaps an omen. Amelia,
eyes reflecting both the fire and her private obsessions, finally whispered,
“Every ghost hunter chases fame,
but it’s the forgotten ones that bite back.”

When the night finally released them to sleep,
their dreams tangled with the imagined screams
and half-heard whispers of places lost to rot and regret.

The next day, their journey unfolded through roads barely marked on any map–overgrown lanes, crumbling asphalt, wild green reclaiming what man had once insisted on owning. Forgotten places do not die quietly;
their remains persist in the teeth of nature, refusing absolution. The group’s passage felt intrusive,
the air itself thick with old secrets and hostile to strangers.

They reached the first site as dusk surrendered to a bruised twilight. The mansion–its once-opulent facade now strangled in ivy and black mold–seemed to sigh at their arrival. Its windows, half-smashed, stared back with glassy, accusatory eyes. The ballroom, cavernous and hollow, was a mausoleum of splendor gone feral. Plaster crumbled from the ceiling, where the skeletons of chandeliers dangled like hanged royalty. The scent of rotting silk and ancient dust pressed in on their lungs;
the silence was so absolute it nearly roared.

“Imagine what happened here,” Amelia murmured, tracing the faded gold of a forgotten mural–her touch hesitant,
as if afraid to awaken something slumbering within the walls. Her voice was quickly swallowed by the hush,
a stillness broken only by the distant,
arrhythmic tapping of a broken shutter.

Tom’s eyes scanned the empty gallery, suspicion furrowing his brow. “These places remember,
” he said. “They hold their breath,
waiting for someone to listen.”

They set up their equipment in grim ritual: EMF meters, thermal cameras, voice recorders
–their faith in technology little more than a charm against the ancient dark. Each device hummed to life,
broadcasting hope and futility in equal measure.

The supernatural had been waiting. Static clung to the air, cold spots blossomed around their ankles,
and every shadow seemed to pulse with possibility. The darkness was not a lack of light but a presence
–active, sentient, and unspeakably old.

“Leave,” hissed a voice so faint it could have been the wind,
or the creak of a dying board. But it cut through the group’s bravado,
slicing away the pretense that they were in control.

Sarah’s knuckles whitened around her flashlight. “Did you–did anyone else
–?” The question trailed off,
unfinished. No one wanted to admit how afraid they were.

Together, shoulder to shoulder, they advanced down a corridor choked with the ghosts of old wallpaper and the smell of mildew. Their lights picked out shards of mirror embedded in the plaster
–each reflection warped,
their own faces stretched and pale, almost unfamiliar.

They reached a room where time had collapsed. Broken furniture lay in heaps, the floor a minefield of shattered glass. On the far wall,
a message in peeling paint: DO NOT WAKE WHAT SLEEPS. The words seemed to breathe,
fluttering in the draft as if alive.

“Some ghosts want to be forgotten,
” Amelia whispered. “Maybe we should listen.”

“Maybe we’re the ones disturbing the dead,” Tom said,
voice low and ragged. “But what if forgetting them is what gives them power?”

The debate never reached its conclusion. A sharp, violent crash detonated behind them–a mirror, splitting itself into a thousand frantic reflections. The air turned ice-thick, breath crystallized mid-sentence,
and the team scattered in a desperate flight. Boots slipped on dust,
hands grasped blindly at each other as they navigated blind corners
and the memories of footsteps that did not belong to them.

Outside, the world seemed impossibly loud–cicadas shrieked,
the wind thrashed branches against rusted gutters. The house behind them stood unchanged,
but now it loomed, swollen with secrets it would not share.

“I thought we understood what we were doing,” Amelia stammered,
cradling her recorder like a child’s charm. “I thought we were chasing ghosts. I didn’t know we’d become their prey.”

Marcus, breathing hard, stared back at the house, his face pale but set. “Some places aren’t haunted by accident,
” he said. “They feed on our curiosity. On our need to know.”

As they trudged back through the trees, every snapping twig sounded like a warning. Each remembered glance over their shoulders told them that something had noticed them,
marked them, followed them into the waking world. Their equipment had captured nothing,
and yet everything had changed.

There would be other sites–an abandoned abbey, a child’s orphanage shrouded in mist, a hospital where even the rats refused to linger. Every place forgotten by the living was, in its own way,
adopted by something else. And each night, as the team gathered around their fire,
they spoke less of what they wanted to find,
and more of what they desperately hoped not to awaken.

The forgotten places did not forgive, and what they remembered would haunt the hunters long after the world had moved on
–whispering from the dark, patient as time,
always waiting for someone foolish enough to listen.

The Haunting of Hill House – Whispers in Hill House

In the eddying gloom at the edge of the world,
Hill House rises from the soil like a wound that refuses to close
Stones veined with secrets, windows gaping–hungry for faces,
for the warmth that once kept winter at bay
and madness at a distance
No hand laid its foundation in innocence, no wall was raised without rumor;
every beam warped to fit not the blueprints of carpenters
But the intent of shadows that pressed themselves into the marrow of the place,
until the timbers themselves began to listen, to remember

Night descends and every corridor is thick with breathless hush
–a stillness strung tight, thrumming with regret
Each door keeps vigil over unspoken tragedies,
every knocker cold against the palm as if refusing to admit hope or sunlight
The paper peels in intricate patterns, a map of vanished joys and unresolved terrors,
while the dust accumulates, layer upon layer
Softening the edges of the world until footsteps are muffled,
laughter curdles, and memory becomes a trick of the failing air

Mirrors in Hill House never return what is given to them
–images warp and tangle, faces shift behind the glass
A woman brushing her hair with spectral patience,
a child’s mouth open in a silent cry,
a line of blood unmoving down the wall
Rooms fold in on themselves, their purposes eroded by time: a nursery clotted with cold sunlight,
a parlor trembling with voices never invited
Staircases that twist toward attics no one claims,
where the breath of the past weighs heavy
and the brave become lost in the blink of an eye

Hill House hears its own heartbeat in the rattling pipes,
the scrape of branches against stone,
the faint, insistent tap at an upstairs window
A language written in sighs and shudders,
in doors that close without wind,
in clocks that run only backward
It is a mouth that will not shut,
a mind steeped in grief–its loneliness thick as breath
And the living who cross its threshold find themselves reordered: the faithful lose faith,
the cheerful discover despair
Every promise frays,
every intention falters beneath the weight of the house’s unending hunger

At midnight, shadows spill from the woodwork, swirling at the periphery
–a waltz of vanished mothers, fallen lovers,
children who never found the morning
They whisper in tongues older than sorrow,
their secrets thick as molasses
And the living clutch their blankets, counting heartbeats,
feeling the icy brush of unseen hands upon their cheeks
Fingers press against glass from the inside;
walls pulse with the agony of withheld confessions
And no voice–however loud, however rational
–can dislodge the impression that Hill House is always listening
That it waits for new sorrow,
that it will turn love into madness
and memory into hauntings that linger long after the last tenant has gone

Outside, trees snarl their limbs toward the roof,
the moon stains the ground in sickly silver
And from every room a story breathes: Eleanor’s longing written in damp sheets,
Luke’s terror echoing through stairwells
Lives compressed by Hill House until they shatter,
the fragments left to rattle in the dark
And still, the house endures,
indifferent to its reputation, its infamy, its myth
It waits for footsteps on gravel, a new soul at the threshold,
another mind to undo, another heart to devour
For Hill House was born bad, and in its marrow the cold remains
A promise that every visitor will leave less whole
And that the whispers behind its doors will outlast even the memory of light

The Heart’s Beacon

In the twisting dark where shadows plot and creep
A heart serves as an unblinking beacon
A pulse that guides through winding corridors, stone and echo deep
Darkness bends and presses, plotting in every twist and turn
Yet the heart’s radiance blazes on, its course unbroken, never cheap
Corridors stretch, blind and unending, traps and riddles by design
But the flame within carves a passage, making terror’s gloom benign

Phantoms lean from the corners, their cold gazes sharp as knives
Yet the heart’s unwavering fire forces them to scatter and flee
A constant rebellion against despair’s grip, where nothing dead survives
Illuminating paths the frightened eyes refuse to see
Even as the maze narrows, each wall closing like a fist
The beacon grows bolder, brightening every shadowed twist

Among the sighs of those who failed, in haunted air thick with loss
This heart’s glow endures, defiant when every other light has crossed
It refuses the silence of defeat, the sweet surrender to despair
Igniting each step with longing, making even the coldest stone aware
Here in the snarl of the maze, where most would beg to turn and run
The beacon forges onward, golden as a rising sun

It is not the absence of fear that makes this journey complete
But the refusal to let fear dictate when and how you retreat
The pulse of hope is stitched through with defiance and will
A war drum in the ribs, a stubborn refusal to keep still
So long as the heart burns, so long as it spits in the face of the night
No darkness can claim you; the maze surrenders to the light

The maze never ends, its shadows ever reforming
But the heart’s beacon keeps burning, a warning and a promise
That in every twisting path, every hour of mourning
There is a light inside the chest that will not break or miss
For every shadow spun, for every hope denied or beaten
The heart becomes the legend, the path, and the beacon

The Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, California – Hollywood Beauty

Gilded lobby humming, a thousand chandeliers all teeth and grin
History nestles in powdered corners, paper-thin
A hush clings to the marble, golden age lacquered on the floor
Past the doorman’s nod, a chill creeps in–something wants more
Mirrors gleam with secrets–Marilyn, lips parted for a lost laugh
Gloved hands pressed in reflection, almost real, almost half
Glass never forgets a lover, a line, or a final glare
Her sadness lingers, trapped between the light and stale air

Tinseltown ghosts promenade, facades flicker in the lift
Montgomery Clift paces, shadow-worn, his memory swift
Down the long red hallway, fame seeps through cracks in the tile
Names whispered in linen closets, drama folded in every mile
The pool ripples with laughter, ice in cocktails rattles slow
By moonlight, the famous dead gather, glow by glow
Every suite rehearses tragedies, lines recited by heart
Glamour’s a rehearsal that ends in the dark

From rooftop to ballroom, the night thickens with regret
Spotlights dust off legends the living can’t forget
Chandeliers flicker, blinking Morse code for the lost
A shimmer, a sigh, a memory gilded in frost
Hollow applause filters under the doors
Room service delivers nostalgia, pain polished like floors
Somewhere behind the curtain, the present breaks and runs
Hollywood’s darling ghosts can’t resist a rerun

Marilyn’s reflection glances, haunting every pane
A blush of longing, perfume and pain
She pirouettes through eternity, skirt twirling in spectral light
Her secrets stitched in whispers, a waltz that never ends right
Montgomery’s silhouette, bent by worry, wanders unseen
A script cut short, a romance never clean
Faded press clippings rustle, contracts signed in hope and gin
Fame’s cruel guarantee: you never leave, you never win

Change the scene–poolside under midnight palms
Spectral laughter bubbles, and glamour keeps her charms
Echoes linger by the water, hush thick on the air
Every ripple a rumor, a promise, a dare
Legends haunt these walls with smudged mascara and grins
A slow macabre ballet of losses and sins
Here, even the starlight’s rehearsed,
each shadow longing for applause
History wearing high heels, dragging her flaws

If you listen by the elevator, you’ll hear the past descend
Old Hollywood laughter, broken hearts that never mend
You’ll leave with glitter in your hair
and dread stitched to your coat
Haunted by the echo of stories stars never wrote
The Roosevelt’s embrace blurs the line,
fantasy collides with true
A palace of hauntings, where the famous dead see through you

Ghosts in high heels, sequins, and scars
Humming through the lobby, scraping at the stars
The beauty here is brittle, eternal, sublime
Hollywood’s shadow, dazzling and soaked in time

The Interest in Maintaining Interest

The recursive loop of caring that I care—
the interest in the interest, the aware
thing asking of itself: do you still want
this wanting? The self-monitoring font
of the second-order grey, the meta-
level of the flat: the letter
inside the letter, the thought about the thinking,
the grey reviewing grey while slowly sinking.

The interest in maintaining interest,
the effort past the effort, the insist
of self-willed engagement when the genuine went quiet—
I built the want from parts, I ran the riot
of the manufactured caring, and it held,
the built enthusiasm compelled
the real to follow, interest following interest—
the effort of the maintaining: manifest.

The mornings when the wanting comes pre-loaded,
I pocket it, I don’t get overcrowded
with analysis—the given day,
I take the freely offered and I stay
inside it. When the wanting doesn’t show,
I’m the foreman of the effort, slow
construction of the caring, steel by steel—
the built engagement is engagement: real.

What I’ve learned about the second-order grey:
the made thing and the born thing run the same way
once they’re running. Interest built from will
becomes the genuine—it circulates, it fills
the hour like the natural. I’ve been doing this
for years, the maintenance, the practiced bliss
of manufactured caring, and it holds—
the recursive loop resolves, the interest: bold.

The Keeper of Night’s Glow

In the black depth of night where shadows plot and creep
There stands a stubborn sentinel, refusing even to sleep
A star burning behind the ribs, a lantern’s bold defiance
While darkness whispers cowardice, the keeper mounts a stance
Not for a moment does the inner blaze flicker or falter
It flares, it singes, it roars at the void’s relentless assault

Gloom prowls, teeth gleaming, eager to feast on radiant dreams
Yet the keeper unsheathes hope like steel, and nothing is as it seems
The void sulks, plotting in corners, hurling nightmares and pain
But the inner flame only mocks, burning away every stain
This light will not cower, will not retreat from the dark’s embrace
It laughs as it dances, casting fire across night’s cold face

If the night tries to rob secrets from your soul’s inner keep
Let the blaze guard the threshold, burning horrors in their sleep
Shine on, relentless luminary, let the gloom gnash its teeth
Your fate is your weapon, and the shadows tremble beneath
For every spectral claw, for every trick of fear
The keeper’s fire blazes–unyielding, crystal clear

Storms may howl and shadows crawl, but the flame endures
Lighthouse amid tempest, a hope that darkness never cures
Let the void plot, let the gloom deepen and the winds moan
You blaze ever brighter, conquering the unknown
You are the master of this darkness, the keeper and the glow
And the night must learn what it means to bow

The Last Exorcism

The day’s last light bled out across broken pews and faded murals,
a dying fire clinging to the edges of stained glass that hadn’t caught the sun in decades.
The church, an edifice of old stone and older secrets,
exhaled cold air with each shift of the wind.
Within its walls,
time seemed to warp and collapse–every footstep echoing the prayers,
confessions, and terrors of generations past.
No congregation remained;
only shadows kept vigil.

Father Elias stood just within the doorway,
a silhouette limned by dusk,
his cassock heavy with the weight of a thousand exorcisms–victories and failures alike pressed into the tired lines of his face.
He breathed in the scent of dust, mildew,
and something older–something almost sweet,
like the memory of incense mingling with rot.
Every sense was tuned to the trembling edge of the moment: the final confrontation he had tried for months to evade,
the reason he could not sleep,
the battle for a soul he feared was already lost.

He let his gaze drift over the ruined nave: shattered benches,
a toppled altar,
melted wax puddled on the flagstones like abandoned offerings.
At the center of the apse, beneath the fractured rose window,
sat Mara–a thin, pallid girl of sixteen,
her wrists bound loosely to the arms of a chair with frayed altar cloths.
Her head lolled, copper hair matted against skin ashen as tallow,
her breathing shallow,
her presence at once haunting and heartbreakingly fragile.

He crossed the threshold,
the doors groaning shut behind him as if sealing a tomb.
Candlelight flickered from sconces–more shadows than illumination,
wavering against the stone.
Every step Elias took felt heavier,
as if the earth itself resisted his approach.

A floorboard snapped beneath his boot;
Mara’s head jerked up.
Her eyes, once bright as rain-soaked leaves,
now glimmered with an uncanny sheen–alien, animal, unblinking.
“You came,” she said, voice splitting the silence,
at once a child’s plea and something older, mocking, cruel.
“Did you bring enough faith for both of us, Father?”

Elias’s hand hovered at the edge of his stole,
his thumb finding the indentation left by years of nervous prayers.
“You know why I’m here,” he murmured,
refusing to let the tremor in his voice betray him.
“I’m here to bring you back, Mara.
I’m here to end this.”

She laughed, and the sound skittered up the walls like insects.
“Back?
There’s no going back.
Not for you.
Not for me.” Her lips curled in a parody of a smile.
“Sit, Father.
Let’s not pretend you haven’t been waiting for this.”

Elias knelt,
reciting words as ancient as the stones beneath him–Latin phrases carved into the marrow of his bones.
The candles guttered, shadows writhing like eels across Mara’s face.
“By the authority–” he began, but Mara’s voice overrode his, a choked,
guttural rasp: “Save your words, priest.
The demon is listening, but so am I.”

A gust rattled the windows, scattering dust and faded flower petals.
Elias pressed on, sweat cold on his brow,
his words desperate now–a liturgy weaponized,
hurled against whatever darkness lurked behind the girl’s trembling flesh.
Mara’s eyes rolled back, her body convulsed,
lips peeling back from cracked teeth.

And then, as if a shroud had lifted,
she stilled–staring at him with startling lucidity,
voice low and fierce: “Stop it.
Stop fighting.
I’m not the enemy you think I am.”

He faltered, the prayer fragmenting. “If not you, then what?”

She shuddered,
the chair creaking beneath her as if straining under invisible weight.
“There’s something here.
Something old.
It talks to me.
It promises things I want, things I need.
But it’s not all darkness, Father.
What if what you call evil is just…
misunderstood?”

His heart thudded, mind teetering between compassion and suspicion.
“Demons don’t negotiate, Mara.
They destroy.”

She laughed–a sound with too many echoes behind it.
“Destroy?
Or reveal?
It’s easy to fear what you don’t understand.” Her voice dropped,
hungry, seductive: “It’s easy to call the unknown evil,
to call doubt sin.
But what if doubt is the key?
What if faith itself is the cage?”

Elias felt the foundations of his conviction buckle.
He tried to remember every soul he’d failed to save,
every time his certainty had been eroded by the sheer brutality of the world.
The demon’s voice slithered through Mara’s mouth: “You want power, Father.
Power to know what’s coming.
Power to choose who is saved.
I can give it to you.”

He recoiled, whispering, “No. Not at the cost of my soul.”

“But what’s a soul?” Mara–no, the thing inside Mara–whispered back.
“A list of sins?
A record of regrets?
A story you cling to because you’re afraid of what comes after?”

The room shuddered, a low thrumming building beneath the floor.
The air pressed in, suffocating.
Elias felt the urge to surrender, to give in, just to make the pressure stop.
“You’re lying,” he choked out.

But Mara shook her head,
tears streaming down her face even as her lips twisted in a mocking grin.
“Am I?
Or is the real sin refusing to listen?
I can show you the truth of things.
I can show you the machinery of good and evil.
It’s not what your prayers say.”

For an instant, Elias saw the world as she described it–no saints,
no devils,
just choices and consequences looping endlessly through time.
He saw the men who’d built this church,
their hands stained with blood and hope in equal measure;
he saw the faith that had comforted the dying and condemned the desperate.
He saw himself, trembling, old, alone in the face of mystery.

His resolve hardened.
“No deal.
Not now.
Not ever.
I came here to set you free–not to barter with your tormentor.”

Mara sobbed, her body wracked with pain, but the shadows clung to her, seething.
“Then fight me, priest.
Fight for me.
But know this–when you cast me out, I don’t vanish.
I change.
I move.
Sometimes I wear your face.
Sometimes I wear hers.
The battle never ends.”

Elias rose, voice raw and stripped of pretense.
“Then let it never end.
I’ll fight until my last breath.”

As the prayers began anew–no longer rote, but burning, furious,
desperate–the room became a crucible,
light and dark warring across Mara’s body, across Elias’s face,
across the bones of the church itself.
The candles flared, then snuffed out,
plunging everything into a silence so deep it felt alive.

In the aftermath, Father Elias stood alone beside the empty chair,
unsure who had won or lost.
Mara’s fate, the demon’s promise, his own faith–none were clear.
Outside, the sky had gone black,
and the old church stood silent as a mausoleum,
every shadow waiting for the next exorcist to try their luck against what lurks in the darkness.

He left with the bitter knowledge that every soul saved is haunted,
and every victory over evil is only a postponement.
The last exorcism is never truly the last–not for those who know the shape of the night.

The Last Sunday

The hymnal’s open to a page I’ve memorized for twenty years,
the words still fit my mouth
but not the cavity behind my sternum anymore,
light comes through the window like it always has,
indifferent and gold,
and I sit with my hands in my lap like two small animals gone cold.
The pew is oak and hard, the way they built them hard on purpose,
to remind the body what the spirit costs,
to make devotion surface
through discomfort into something they could call transcendence,
but all I feel is wood against my spine and the slow condensed
weight of a decision I’ve been carrying since before I could name it,
a thing I fed and watered and tried weekly to contain it.
This is the last Sunday I will sit in borrowed light,
the last time I’ll hold the hymnal like a weapon in a fight
I was never really winning, in a war I didn’t start,
the last time I’ll let the organ fill the hollow in my heart
with noise that sounds like comfort from the outside looking in,
the last time I’ll ask forgiveness
for the act of living in my skin.
And the door swings shut behind me, and I don’t go back,
and the light follows me out anyway.

The Last Thing They Said

She said she loved the weather this specific season
he said he would call me back before the week was through
they said goodbye at airports, exits, parking lots
and did not know that was the last goodbye they would use

I think about the ordinariness of final words
how nobody announces that the end is near
you are standing in a doorframe with your jacket on
and then that is all the conversation you will hear

the last thing they said was nothing special
it was coffee cups and car keys and so long
the last thing they said will live forever
inside my head where everything went wrong
and I would give anything to say it back again
to stand there in that ordinary moment one more time
the last thing they said was just the last thing
but now I cannot forget a single line

I have replayed it several hundred thousand times or more
the way the sentence ended, where the stress had been
if I had known that was the last connection being made
I would have held it open, stretched it out, stayed in between

but that is the thing about the final conversations
they look exactly like the ones before
no trumpet call, no lighting shift, no warning
just a screen door closing like a hundred doors

the linguists say that language is just symbol
a system built to move a thought across
but what nobody tells you about symbols is
how much weight they carry when you have taken loss

I will hold the last thing said inside a locked room
in the part of me that only I can see
and I will say their words back to the ceiling
the way they said goodbye to me

The Legend They Remembered

I did not set out to be memorable, I set out to be right,
Did not want the whole crowd chanting
when I walked into the light,
I just wanted the position and the leverage and the deal,
But apparently the combination has a certain kind of appeal.

They remember people who move fast and people who move sure,
They remember people who do not wait
for someone to open the door,
They remember people who arrive and leave a mark upon the wall,
And they forget the ones who stood there politely in the hall.

The ones remembered are the ones who did not ask permission,
The ones who brought a plan
and did not wait for someone’s vision,
The ones remembered crossed the carpet with intent,
And left an impression so specific that nobody forgets.

I did not write a manifesto, did not raise a flag on high,
I just made the right decisions at the moments that apply,
And somewhere in the accumulation of the choices that I made,
Something that resembled reputation coalesced and stayed.

Now they use it as a shorthand for a certain kind of pressure,
For the way I push a deadline and the way I push the measure,
For the style of forward motion that I carry like a coat,
When they want something done efficiently,
I’m first to get the vote.

So the lesson here, if there is one, is embarrassingly plain:
Do the thing you set out for and do it without strain,
Be specific in your wanting and be ruthless in your aim,
And the memory of you will write itself,
your legend and your claim.

The Long Surrender

He didn’t wave a white flag — the surrender was quieter,
the laying down of arms in the specific interior
of a man who fought himself for forty years and finally tired —
the long surrender isn’t cowardice, it’s how the fire expired.

The fights were all internal — the arguments of want
against the arguments of possible, the daily haunt
of who he thought he’d be against who he became —
the long surrender is the moment you stop keeping the same

count of the score between the possible and the actual done,
when you stop measuring the distance between
where you started and the run
you’ve gotten through
— and just acknowledge: this is it, this is the thing —
the long surrender isn’t defeat,
it’s just a different kind of spring.

The long surrender, the white flag no one sees,
the long surrender, the quiet of the peace —
he fought the life he lived for long enough to know the cost,
and the long surrender is the victory of what he almost lost.

He surrendered to the job around the time the job surrendered back
—
a mutual accommodation in the middle of the pack,
where neither one demands what neither one can give —
the transaction of the adequate, the underpinning to live.

He surrendered to the marriage when the marriage had been given
everything it asked for and returned what it was driven
to return
— which was the structure and the comfort and the company —
and he found the structure and the comfort decent currency.

He surrendered to the neighborhood, the block, the set of blocks,
the radius of the known and the predictable and the clocks
that run the days of a man who’s stopped requiring new terrain —
the long surrender to the familiar, the return, the same.

He used to drive past neighborhoods he hadn’t seen and feel
the pull of the unknown, the interesting, the real
possibility of a different life in a different frame —
now the pull is muted
and the same is fine and the same is fine and same.

There’s a dignity in the surrender that the fighting hides,
a maturity in knowing when the tide has turned and bides
its time no longer — when the tide comes in,
a wise man gets off the beach,
and the long surrender is the wisdom of moving out of reach

of the tide’s insistence, the pull of the ambitious sea —
back to the dry land of the adequate and the manageable free,
the freedom of the man who doesn’t need the wave anymore —
the long surrender to the quieter shore.

He’s not sorry for the surrender,
not embarrassed by the laid-down arms —
the war was costing more than it was worth in all its charms
of urgency and ambition and the beautiful insistence
of a self that kept demanding an impossible existence.

The long surrender bought him something that the fighting couldn’t grant
—
the daily low-key living without the want-can’t-want-can’t,
the morning without the battle and the evening without the score
—
the long surrender, and the peace behind the open door.

The peace has its own demands — the maintenance of the quiet,
the daily work of not-fighting and the management of the riot
that used to live inside his chest
— the peace requires its own attention —
the long surrender is not passive, it’s the active intervention

of a man who chose the managed over the magnificent —
and calls the managed good enough
and calls the good enough sufficient.

The long surrender has a taste — it’s flat and it’s specific —
the taste of the arrived at, the taste of the terrific
release of having stopped expecting the impossible to arrive —
the long surrender tastes like finally getting to just be alive

without the constant adjudication of the not-enough —
without the standard set at glory when the ordinary’s plenty tough
—
the long surrender’s taste is the taste of the sustainable,
the long surrender’s grade is quietly maintainable.

The Long Wait

The long wait is not the passive and the simply endured,
The long wait is the strategic and the calculated and the cured,
Of any impulsive action by the cold and by the clear,
And the long wait is the inventory of the fury and the year.

Every year of the long wait was a year of the deliberate,
Every year of the long wait was the cold and the elaborate,
Construction of the case that the long wait was building toward,
And the long wait is the patience of the cold and the long word.

The long wait, the strategic and the cold and the precise,
The long wait, the patience at the calculated price,
Of the deferred and the held and the kept for the right moment,
The long wait is the fury in its most articulate component.

I have been in the long wait for a very deliberate time,
I have been in the long wait through the cold
and through the climb,
Of the evidence assembled and the record kept intact,
And the long wait is the patience before the cold and final act.

The cold and final act of the deliberate and the right,
The cold and final act of the long wait and the night,
Of the patient and the vigil and the keeping of the cold,
And the long wait is the fury and the fury is the gold.

The long wait is over now and the over is the word,
The long wait is over and the cold fury will be heard,
In the deliberate and the measured and the calculated clear,
And the long wait is the wait that has been building to right here.

The Memorial Service

They held it in the church he never attended
and said the things that church attendance would imply,
and everyone who showed up comprehended
the gap between the ceremony and the guy
who’d spent his weekend mornings fixing engines
and reading box scores on the front porch until noon.
But the ritual needs its religious regions
and so we borrowed his, the Presbyterian tune
of comfortable Presbyterian consolation.

The memorial service does what it must do,
it marks the space between the living and the through,
it gives the grief a container and a form
and warms the room against the specific storm
of losing someone, the service doing what it must do.

The slideshow was the best part, honestly,
the photos running through the decades in sequence,
the younger image of him impossibly
slim and full of brightness and the essence
of whatever it is that photographs contain
of actual youth before the years accumulate,
and everyone watching laughed and felt the pain
of recognition and the bittersweet weight.

After, people stood around with food
and talked about him in the past tense awkwardly
at first, then easily, as if the mood
had shifted and the ceremony’s awkwardly
formal frame had given them permission
to tell the actual stories, not the polished kind,
the real ones, and the whole strange commission
of a memorial service came to mind:
permission to keep living, to remember, to be.

The Memory Shared

You tucked a laugh beneath your breath,
then let it loose like contraband light
I held it up against my bad days,
and watched it win without a fight
Your fingertips wrote tiny truce notes on the knuckles of my hand
And I learned devotion can look casual,
then hit like a one-man band
We weren’t built for tidy captions,
we weren’t raised for clean replies
We traded glances like hot currency,
then spent it where it never dries
I carry you in ordinary hours, in the dullest hallway glare
Your voice returns in my bloodstream,
a private riot, bright and bare

[Chorus] The memory shared keeps paying rent in every room I pass through there
The memory shared keeps turning grief into a dare that I can wear
The memory shared keeps burning clean through every cheap disguise I tear
The memory shared keeps saying stay alive,
stay sharp, stay near, stay fair

We had that night in borrowed quiet,
when the city held its tongue
Your hair fell loose across my wrist, and I felt time come undone
I watched you sip your drink like danger,
slow grin, unbothered poise
Then you leaned in,
said my worst thoughts could never drown your noise
I took your shoulder under my mouth,
left heat where doubt had been
You shivered once, then held me steady,
like sin can turn to discipline
We didn’t need a courtroom story, no verdict, no moral cheer
We wanted truth in small receipts,
the kind you fold and keep for years

[Chorus] The memory shared keeps paying rent in every room I pass through there
The memory shared keeps turning grief into a dare that I can wear
The memory shared keeps burning clean through every cheap disguise I tear
The memory shared keeps saying stay alive,
stay sharp, stay near, stay fair

I’ve seen romance sold like a costume, lace talk with empty eyes
I’ve watched men praise their own reflection,
then call it paradise
You never fed me polished slogans, you gave me hunger with a map
You gave me tenderness with teeth in it, then dared me not to nap
You said my quiet wasn’t weakness, you said my anger had a bruise
You kissed it like a lit confession,
then told me not to play it cool
Now every joke that lands around me gets measured against your grin
If I laugh, it’s got your fingerprint,
the honest kind that cuts through skin

[Chorus] The memory shared keeps paying rent in every room I pass through there
The memory shared keeps turning grief into a dare that I can wear
The memory shared keeps burning clean through every cheap disguise I tear
The memory shared keeps saying stay alive,
stay sharp, stay near, stay fair

When mornings come like cheap interrogation,
I picture you half asleep
Your shirt pulled down, your eyes half open,
your body warm, your breathing deep
I hear you say my name in soft threat,
like love can still demand its due
I answer back in whispered profanity,
then laugh, since it’s only me and you
I keep our moments like contraband,
not sacred, not polite, not staged
Just lived-in proof that I was held,
then changed without a sermon page
If memory is just a loaded thing,
then yours is one I choose to bear
The sweetest violence, sharp and steady,
the memory shared, the memory shared

The Midnight Slasher

A shadow creeps along the path unseen
A figure cloaked in darkness,
with a knife that glimmers with a deadly sheen

The campers sleep unaware of the fate that lies just steps away
Their dreams of summer days turn into nightmares by the break of day

Blood stains the forest floor,
a silent scream that echoes in the night
A hunt that ends in terror, with no one left to put up a fight

The slasher moves with practiced grace,
a phantom in the moonlit wood
Leaves a trail of death and fear in a place
where innocence once stood

Fear the blade that cuts the air
and the eyes that pierce the dark
For once he finds you,
there’s no escape from the slasher’s cruel mark

Dawn breaks with a chilling breeze,
the forest whispers tales of fright
Of campers lost to legend, their souls bound to the endless night

No one speaks of what they saw, the horror etched in silent cries
For in the stillness of the midnight hour,
another shadow will arise

The Mirror at Three

I wake at 3 AM from dreams I can’t remember feeling watched
Stumble to the bathroom half-asleep turn on the light and stop
The face looking back isn’t mine the features are all wrong
Someone else is wearing my reflection
and they’ve been there all along
Same build same height same everything except the eyes are dead
And the mouth curves different
and I know with certainty and dread
That whoever this is has been practicing has been learning how I move
Has been studying my mannerisms waiting for the moment to improve
Their impersonation waiting for me to notice them

At three AM the mirror shows me who I’m not
At three AM I see the thing that I forgot
Was living in the glass pretending to reflect
At three AM the face I wear becomes suspect
This is terror made of familiarity gone slightly wrong
This is recognizing features that don’t quite belong

I’m staring at an almost-me an approximation close
But missing something fundamental something I can’t diagnose
I blink they blink but half a second late
I raise my hand theirs follows but the timing’s not quite right
And I’m frozen standing there at 3 AM
Wondering if I’m dreaming or if something else began
When I stopped paying attention to my own reflection
Stopped checking if the person in the mirror showed connection
To the person that I am or if they’d slowly been replaced
By something wearing my appearance wearing my own face

I turn away but can’t shake the feeling that they’re still there
Still watching from the glass still wearing what I wear
Still perfecting their impression still preparing for the day
When they emerge and I’m the one trapped in the mirror’s way
I go back to bed but can’t sleep can’t close my eyes
Keep seeing that face that almost-face that compromise
Between my features and something else’s needs
Wondering how long they’ve been there how long they’ve been learning me
If every mirror holds one if every reflection hides
Something patient something hungry something that resides
In the space between the glass and what we think we see

Now every mirror makes me hesitate makes me check
Makes me study my reflection looking for the defect
Looking for the sign that something else is looking back

The Mirror’s Curse

The first time the Thompson family brought the mirror into their home, the air shifted–a subtle but unmistakable change, as if the house itself drew a deep, wary breath. The antique, procured from an estate auction notorious for its haunted relics,
was the sort of artifact that seemed to watch rather than be watched. Its baroque frame, carved with serpentine vines and open-mouthed cherubs,
radiated a cold gleam,
catching what little light the hall could offer
and twisting it into something unnatural.

Even in the bright chaos of moving day, the mirror brooded in its corner. Dust motes swirled before it like the remains of old dreams. It had once hung in the parlor of a woman whose tragic life had ended with a locked door,
a gunshot, and a silence so profound that neighbors spoke of it as a hole left in the world. Now,
in the Thompson home, its history simmered beneath the surface.

The house itself was old and stubborn, walls thick with the sighs of previous generations. The wallpaper, yellowed and brittle,
peeled in long strips like shedding skin. There was a chill in the hallway that seemed to deepen with the mirror’s arrival,
and no matter how often Tom bled the radiators,
it would not fade.

It was Sarah, always the most sensitive to the unseen, who noticed the change first. She wandered the hallway late at night, pulled by a sound only she could hear–a delicate tapping, like fingernails drumming from the other side of the glass. One evening,
after a thunderstorm had rolled over the city, she pressed her palm against the mirror and flinched. The glass was so cold it burned,
and her reflection seemed to flicker,
replaced for an instant by a pale figure with hollow eyes
and lips parted in a silent scream.

“Mom,” Sarah whispered, tugging at Laura’s sleeve,
“there’s someone in the mirror.”

Laura knelt, smoothing her daughter’s tangled hair. “It’s just us, honey,” she said, trying to believe it herself. But that night, after everyone had gone to bed,
she crept back to the hallway. Moonlight pooled around the base of the mirror, and for a moment,
Laura was certain she saw a shadow flit across its surface
–impossibly swift, gone before she could draw breath.

From then on, every member of the family felt it. Tom found himself stopping in front of the glass, transfixed by his own face, which seemed to age before his eyes. Crow’s feet etched deeper,
stubble shadowed his jaw where none should be. Behind him,
the hall would lengthen impossibly,
doors multiplying into infinity, all leading to nowhere.

Laura began having dreams–fragmented, lucid visions in which she stood before the mirror in a white dress, her hands bloodied,
her eyes dry and ancient. She’d wake gasping, sweat pooling in the hollow of her throat,
the impression of cold fingers pressed around her wrist.

By the third week, the apparitions had grown bold. In the dusky hours just before dawn, the glass would shimmer with a film of condensation, and faces would emerge–contorted with pain,
mouths opening and closing in futile warning. Sometimes, the images would linger even after the family looked away,
reflected in the window glass, in the gleam of a spoon,
in the black screen of the television.

Once, Sarah watched as a woman in a white dress reached out from the mirror, her hand nearly breaking the surface. Sarah’s scream brought her parents running,
but by the time they arrived, there was only Sarah’s pale reflection,
wide-eyed and shivering, her breath clouding the glass.

Tom began to drink more, hiding the bottles in the garage. He told himself he was being foolish, that it was all just suggestion and stress, but in his private moments,
he saw the old woman from the stories–her eyes milky with grief–standing behind him,
whispering his name in a voice that was both familiar
and utterly alien.

Laura started finding things out of place–a porcelain figurine moved from the mantel to the hall,
old letters scattered across the floor as if caught in a wind only the mirror could conjure. The family cat,
Molly, vanished one night,
her soft mews echoing faintly from behind the mirror
for days after.

One night, rain hammered the windows and thunder shook the walls. The power flickered, then died,
leaving the house in shivering darkness. The Thompsons gathered in the hall,
flashlights in hand, hearts pounding.

“We have to do something,” Laura said,
her voice brittle as glass. “This thing–it’s feeding on us.”

Sarah sobbed, “They’re trapped! We can’t just throw it away. That’s not how it works. The woman in white
–she wants us to help her.”

Tom shook his head, jaw clenched. “No more. We smash it. We burn it. I don’t care if it’s worth a thousand dollars
–we get rid of it now.”

As Tom lifted a hammer, the mirror began to thrum, a low vibration that rose until it rattled the teeth in their skulls. Shadows poured from the corners of the hall,
pooling around their feet. Laura saw the woman in the white dress standing just behind Tom’s reflection,
eyes shining with something like hope–or warning.

The hammer swung down. It struck the glass, but instead of shattering, the mirror gave–rippling like water, swallowing the hammer up to its head. Tom screamed and jerked back,
but his arm had vanished to the elbow, the glass sucking him in as if it were hungry. The air crackled,
the house groaned,
and the smell of earth and rot flooded the hallway.

Sarah grabbed her mother’s hand,
sobbing. “Don’t let it take him!”

In that moment, Laura understood: the mirror was not just a window to the past–it was a door, and it was open. She seized Sarah, yanking her away just as Tom,
eyes wide and staring, was dragged into the glass,
swallowed whole by a darkness so profound it seemed to consume the very idea of light.

The hallway shrieked with wind that came from nowhere. The wallpaper peeled itself from the walls, exposing veins of old,
crumbling plaster. Every lightbulb in the house burst. The sound of hundreds of voices–pleading,
raging, weeping–filled the air,
so dense and layered that Laura could taste the despair on her tongue.

She fled with Sarah, slamming the bedroom door, pushing a dresser against it. For hours, they listened to the chaos outside
–the sound of the mirror wailing, of Tom’s voice echoing through the halls,
sometimes frantic,
sometimes whispering in a language Laura didn’t recognize.

When the dawn finally came, weak and gray, the house had stilled. Laura crept into the hall, clutching Sarah to her chest. The mirror was unchanged,
but Tom was gone. Only his wedding band remained,
pressed into the frame as though grown from the wood.

Sleep fled the Thompsons after that. Laura spent her days researching haunted mirrors, finding references to similar curses–family after family destroyed, their names erased,
their fates left as cautionary tales. Sarah drew the faces she’d seen in the glass,
filling a notebook with grim portraits. “They’re lonely,
” she explained, “but they’re angry, too.”

On the third night, as Laura dozed fitfully beside her daughter,
a whisper threaded into her dreams: Set us free. Bring him back. Only a soul can trade
for a soul.

Laura woke to find Sarah gone. In a panic, she rushed to the hallway, where Sarah stood in her pajamas,
hands pressed against the mirror. Inside the glass,
Tom hovered in darkness, his eyes huge and beseeching.

“Mom,” Sarah murmured,
“they said they’ll let Daddy go if I go with them.”

Laura lunged, catching Sarah’s arm. “No! They’re lying!”

The mirror’s surface boiled, faces swirling–hundreds of them–children,
mothers, soldiers,
all mouthing the same words: Trade. Trade. Trade.

Desperate, Laura searched for help. A local priest, when he heard her story, refused to set foot in the house. An old medium agreed to visit,
trembling as she entered the hall. She lit sage, muttered prayers,
traced symbols on the mirror’s frame. For a moment,
the air warmed. The figures faded.

But as the ritual reached its peak, the mirror erupted in a thunderclap, blasting the medium across the hall. She struck the wall,
crumpled to the floor, blood trickling from her nose. Laura dragged her away,
sobbing, as the mirror’s glass roiled like a stormy sea.

The medium gasped, clutching Laura’s hand. “You can’t break it. You can only contain it. Bury it,
cover every inch with salt
and silver. Never let it reflect the living.”

“Will Tom come back?” Laura begged, voice breaking.

The medium shook her head. “He’s part of it now. The only way out is to leave,
to seal the door, to never look back.”

That night, Laura and Sarah packed what they could and left the house. They sealed the hallway, covering the mirror with heavy cloth,
pouring lines of salt around it, tacking up silver crosses. As they left,
Sarah looked back, tears streaming down her face.

“I’m sorry, Daddy,” she whispered. “I tried.”

The house sat empty for years. Neighbors reported strange lights, screams at midnight, the scent of burning hair drifting through the air on still nights. Occasionally,
children dared each other to peek through the windows. Sometimes, they glimpsed a woman in white,
or a man pounding silently on the glass,
or a little girl holding her mother’s hand, eyes pleading.

The house was finally demolished, the remains carted off to the landfill. The mirror, however, was never found. Some say it was buried in the earth, deep and hungry,
waiting for the next family to unearth its secrets. Others believe it was broken up,
shards scattered and lost,
each piece a doorway for something older and far more dangerous.

But in the deepest part of the landfill, under tons of soil and broken dreams, a sliver of glass gleams,
reflecting not the sun but a pair of haunted,
desperate eyes. The curse is patient. The curse is eternal. The mirror waits.

The Morphine Protocol

At the end they increase the morphine for the comfort care,
The palliative protocol that manages the air,
Moving in and out of lungs that are already making,
The clinical sounds of what the nurses call the taking.

The morphine doesn’t hasten the end, the studies show,
But it reduces the suffering in the slow,
Process of the body stopping its systems one by one,
The analgesic mercy in what cannot be undone.

The morphine protocol, the comfort at the end,
The morphine protocol, what the palliative can send,
Across the threshold of the ordinary pain,
The morphine protocol, the relief of the campaign,
Of the body’s last work, made less sharp and more,
The morphine protocol at the final door.

I’ve been in the room when the protocol was running,
The specific quality of the breathing and the stunning,
Slowness of the process measured in the minutes,
Between the exhalation and the next one in it.

The nurses know the rhythm of the end, the change,
In the breathing pattern at the edge of the range,
And they come in more frequently as the pattern shifts,
The specific attention of the hospice’s gifts.

I want to die with the morphine protocol running,
When the time comes, I want the gunning,
Of the discomfort down to the manageable and the through,
Of the passage made less sharp than it would be otherwise too.

I want the people in the room to know I said this now,
While I can say it in the lucid and the how,
Of the clearly stated preference, the advance directive,
Clear on what I want and the specific objective.

The Night Light Confession

I kept the night light on until I was twelve
Not because I was afraid of the dark
But because of what the dark showed me
When the light went out

Shapes in the corner that had weight
Shadows that breathed independently
The closet door opening three inches
Every single night at 2 AM

My parents said imagination
My therapist said anxiety
But neither of them spent the night
In the room that breathed without me

The night light kept the covenant
Between the child and what lived in the wall
The night light was the terms of the agreement
And the darkness honored the deal

I went back to that house last year
Thirty years older, less afraid
Or so I thought until I climbed the stairs
And stood in front of my childhood bedroom

The night light was still plugged in
Still burning the same amber glow
Same outlet, same bulb
In a house that had changed owners three times

And when I pulled the plug
The closet door opened three inches
And the darkness that came out
Was older too

But the agreement was with a child
And I am not a child anymore
And whatever was waiting in the closet
Has been waiting for the child to come back

Not the man
The child

And it does not recognize
What I have become
And the new terms
Have not been negotiated

The Night the Radios Went Quiet

At 11:47 every frequency went dead across the dial
no static, just pure silence like the air itself had died
I switched between the stations found nothing but that void
then one voice cut through speaking numbers cold and void of life

counting backward from a hundred with mechanical precision
each digit dropping like a stone into an endless well
and I’m frozen by my dashboard trying to comprehend
what the fuck is happening what this countdown might portend

when all the radios go quiet and one voice starts to count
when every normal station vanishes without announcement
we’re listening to terror broadcast on a frequency we can’t reject
counting down to something that we’re better off not knowing to expect
this is how the world ends with numbers in the dark
this is how fear travels through the air and finds its mark

I called my wife she’s hearing it I called my brother same
every radio in America is playing this one game
this countdown that nobody claimed that nobody explained
just numbers getting smaller getting closer to the end

of whatever this is promising whatever waits at zero
and we’re all just sitting frozen waiting for the blow
experts on the television speculating wildly
government says nothing which makes everything worse
conspiracy theories breeding faster than the counting
while the numbers keep descending ninety eighty seventy worse

Three hours now the count is down to forty-five
and nobody can stop it nobody can trace the source
every frequency hijacked by this voice that’s not alive
that sounds synthetic generated automated of course

but broadcasting from nowhere occupying every band
while we’re calculating what we should do when it hits zero
whether we should run or hide or simply understand
that whatever’s coming we can’t escape can’t fight can’t slow

thirty now and people are abandoning their cities
twenty now the highways are collapsing into chaos
ten now and I’m holding my wife wondering if this is it
if this is how humanity receives its final notice

Three… two… one…

and then just silence nothing happens nothing comes
we’re all still breathing still existing still confused about what won

…

…

Zero

The Obituary I Read

survived by three and one dog, age sixty-two
beloved husband, father, brother, friend
a lifelong fan of fishing and cold weather
passed peacefully, and that was how it ends

they listed all the towns he had ever lived in
they said he served with pride in sixty-nine
they squeezed a man into eleven lines of print
and left out everything that mattered at the time

the obituary i read was not the man i knew
it was a polished stone above the residue
it smoothed the edges off and left the center bare
it said everything except the things that mattered there

they did not mention how he laughed too loudly
or how he said the wrong thing half the time
they did not write about the years he struggled
or how he finally steadied on the line

they said he was devoted, i will take it
they said he will be missed, no argument
but what about the actual living person
who bent and burned before the fire went

we reduce them at the end to their best attributes
we give the dead a coat of cleaner paint
and everyone who ever loved them furiously
now writes them up as a patient, gentle saint

i would rather have the truth in twelve rough paragraphs
the disagreements, failings, and regrets
i would rather have the real man in his full dimensions
than a marble likeness that nobody forgets

so when i go, do not smooth me for the paper
do not call me something softer than i was
just write the year i started and the year i stopped
and let the whole messy middle be the cause

The Obituary

Born in the year that was, died in the year that is,
survived by the wife, three children and six
grandchildren, retired from the business
of being himself in nineteen eighty-six.
Preceded in death by the father and the mother,
preceded in death by the brother from the war,
and now himself preceded by another
generation’s memory of what he was before.

The obituary gets the facts but not the feeling,
it lists the names and dates but not the meaning,
not the arguments and not the laugh,
not the way he always ate the better half
of everything, the obituary gets the facts.

In lieu of flowers send donations to
the research fund for the disease that took him,
which is the most American of what we do
with grief: we try to solve the thing that shook him
from the living, as if money sent forward
could un-death him or could at least prevent
the same thing happening to someone toward
the end of a life as fully lived and spent.

I read the obituary three times on the day it ran
and found it insufficient and exactly right,
insufficient for the complicated man
it summarized, exactly right in its polite
compression of the facts of a human life:
the dates, the survivors, the service information,
the carefully omitted history of his knife-
edge moments and his complex navigation.

The Ones Who Vanished

She carved her particulars into the drywall beside the red-marked X,Said if they come back through that door they’ll find her teeth before her neck,Her eyes were empty postcards from a country that had long refused to heal,Every breath she reclaimed felt like something excavated from a battlefield.There were four of them before her and nobody speaks their particulars aloud,Like if the silence goes sufficiently thick it’ll absorb all of the unresolved crowd,She ran through alleys sutured with screaming that no official party came to trace,Ran so hard and so far she left a piece of herself in that specific place.[Chorus]This is for the ones who vanished — lost in the most visible plain sight,For the women they labeled unstable when they told the truth about the night,For every whispered threat wearing good perfume and a community smile,
This is for the ones who vanished — for the ones who didn’t make the mile.He found her boot in the roadside weeds behind the establishment of prayer,One lace still tied like a deliberate vow, the other burned into the air,They concluded she ran away again like her bruising had made a choice and packed,But we all saw the evidence on the pavement — that’s a different kind of fact.[Chorus]This is for the ones who vanished — lost in the most visible plain sight,
For the women they labeled unstable when they told the truth about the night,For every whispered threat wearing good perfume and a community smile,
This is for the ones who vanished — for the ones who didn’t make the mile.Leave the porch light on and a blade beside the door,
They’re coming back — and they’re not afraid anymore.—

The Overshare at the Right Time

There are two kinds of overshare: the wrong one and the right,
The one that kills a dinner and the one that saves the night,
I overshared at dinner once in a way that cleared the air,
And the table pivoted into something real that was just there.

I had been holding something for approximately three weeks tight,
A situation that I had not processed in the daylight,
And into a silence at the table it just came right out,
More specific than the setting probably warranted throughout.

The overshare at the right time, it can land correct,
It cuts the surface tension and it earns a new respect,
Somebody has to say the actual thing at the table,
The overshare at the right time proves that people are able.

The table went quiet in the way that absorbs a real thing said,
And then someone across from me said yeah, I know that thread,
And we were suddenly in a different conversation than before,
The kind that makes you understand what the dinner was actually for.

Two other people added something that they had been carrying,
The ones who had seemed most likely to be politely tarrying
Through the social obligation of the event with surface care
Turned out to be the ones with the most weight to share.

Now I am not saying overshare your way through every room,
There is a context and a timing to the lifting of the gloom,
The wrong overshare at the wrong table at the wrong hour
Is a grenade without a pin that takes down every flower.

But when the room is right and there is something real in it,
And someone has to say the thing to let the air in a bit,
The right overshare delivered with some judgment can unlock
The kind of conversation you remember round the clock.

The Pallbearers

Six men in suits they didn’t wear quite right,
uncomfortable in the formality of it,
carrying the box in the specific light
of a cold morning, each one in the kit
of obligation and love that he’d somehow
accumulated through the years of being
the man he was, each pallbearer’s brow
carrying the weight of the final freeing.

The pallbearers carry more than what’s inside the box,
they carry every memory the loss unlocks,
the fishing trips and arguments and borrowed tools,
the decades of a friendship and its rules,
the pallbearers carry more than what’s inside the box.

My brother was the one on the left front corner
and I could see from where I sat exactly what
it cost him, could see the mourner
in him managing the lift, the gut
of it, the physical final service
for the man who’d taught him how to cast a line,
the carrying across the church’s surface
to the hearse, the last dignified sign.

There’s no road map for what the pallbearers feel
in the space between the church and the long car,
the ceremonial weight that makes it real
in a way that the service hadn’t quite come far
enough to do: the physical fact of it,
the box, the weight, the actual carrying out
of the person you have loved and called it fit
to honor him this way without a shout.

The People I Passed

Let me tell you about the people that I passed on my way up,
Every face I nodded at and every hand that filled my cup,
The mentors and the obstacles and all the ones who bet against,
The friends who turned to rivals and the rivals who made sense.

There was a man at the entry point who said I’d never scale it,
Turns out he was the first of many forcing me to nail it,
Every person who predicted that my ceiling was too low,
Became a mile marker on the road I had to go.

The people I passed, I remember every one,
Not with bitterness or triumph but with everything we’ve done,
The people I passed were either making me or breaking me in half,
Either way I kept on moving, either way I kept the path.

There was a man at the crossroads who showed me how to read,
The difference between wanting something
and the discipline you need,
I passed him but he travels with me somewhere in my method,
In the patience I apply before the taking is effected.

And there was one whose resistance was the sharpest thing I faced,
Who pushed me with a fury that I never could have placed,
She did not know that every obstacle she stacked up in my way,
Was the composition I’d be using as my scaffold every day.

I am not collecting trophies and I am not collecting debts,
I am cataloguing every lesson in my cabinet of regrets,
Because the people that I passed are not behind me,
they’re inside,
Every one of them a current that I’m riding on this tide.

The Plaque Polished Daily

The brass is a mirror for the man I’m meant to be
I’m scrubbing the tarnish with a frantic
mechanical energy
The chemical venom is a ghost in the back of my throat
A heavy-handed vapor on a black and woolly coat
My ancestor’s signature is a jagged
deep-cut scar
A silver-gilded lie within the center of the jar
I rub the rag until the letters start to burn and bleed
To satisfy the hunger of a cold and ancient greed
The house is a vault for the trophies of the dead
I’m piling up the honors while I’m starving in my head

The Ritual

Deep within the forest’s core, lies a circle on the floor,
A place where shadows come to play,
where ancient rituals hold sway.
Candles flicker in the breeze, whispers echo through the trees,
A coven gathers in the dark, to summon forces from the stark.
Blood is spilled in sacrifice, shadows rise with chilling eyes,
Chants that fill the midnight air,
summoning spirits with a stare.
The forest groans with ancient dread, as the ritual calls the dead,
Figures twist in ghostly grace, haunting every sacred space.
In the circle where shadows dance, a ritual of dark romance,
Voices rise in haunted hymn, pulling spirits from the grim.
Beware the forest’s sacred ground, where ancient secrets are unbound,
For those who seek the ritual’s power,
find themselves in darkest hour.
The coven’s spell lingers on, a tale of power, darkness drawn,
In the circle where shadows fell, lies a story none can tell.

The Room After

We cleared the room in pieces over several weeks
no urgency, no need to force the pace
the shoes went first because the shoes hit hardest
every pair had worn a different face

I left the books the longest on the shelving
I’d run my fingers down the broken spines
and find his handwriting in the margins
a conversation kept across the years and times

the room after is not the room before
it holds the same dimensions but no more
the light comes in the same window as always
but falls on different things than it fell before

the coat that hangs remembers the shoulders
the scarf still holds the coil of where he’d been
I sat in there one afternoon for hours
just breathing in the cedar and the dark and him

They tell you wait, let grief find something solid
let it cling to all the shirts and to the rings
before you let the bulk of someone leave you
before you free yourself from what grief brings

I think we went too fast, we all agreed on
we needed something useful to be done
so we disassembled a life to its seams
called it cleaning up and called it moving on

The room is just a guest room now and neutral
a bed, a lamp, nothing that I can name
and when I pass the doorway in the evening
there’s just the emptiness and just the cold

The Ruined Resilience

In crumbling shadows where the echoes sleep,
Among the ruins, dust and time entwined,
You stand, a figure where the wrecks grow deep,
A monument to what the past confined.
With laughter dark as fallen stones you bear,
The weight of countless years of shattered trust,
Where laughter blends with whispers of despair,
You greet the dawn amidst the shattered dust.
Your stance, a beacon in the ghostly mire,
Where every crack and crevice tells a tale,
Of strength in chaos, never to expire,
A spirit fierce, though in the dark unveiled.
In cracks and crevices, your shadow sprawls,
Where once was grandeur now remains in jest,
Yet still, you rise where endless ruin calls,
Defiant of the wreckage, you attest.
Each crumbling wall, a verse in broken rhyme,
You dance through ashes of the past’s demise,
Your defiance cut in stones and ancient grime,
A somber laugh beneath the moonlit skies.
Amidst the wreckage, you still stand, unbowed,
The ruins whisper tales of your resolve,
Through shattered glass and dust, you stand unshrouded,
A proof to what the dark involves.
The ruins lie in disarray and fray,
Yet you persist where others would decline,
A proof to fight against decay,
A darkened humor in your fierce design.
So as the ruins weave their mournful spell,
You thrive within the desolation’s grip,
A tribute to the strength no age can quell,
A sardonic smile, a steady lip.

The Screaming Tunnel, Canada – Fire Burns

In the tunnel’s hollow depths, where darkness keeps its throne
The whispers crawl through crumbling stone,
a girl’s anguished moan
Her scream once tore the summer air, now brittle, cold, and thin
Trapped in endless silence, bound by shadows stretched within

The tunnel weeps a mournful hymn, a song of fire and pain
Where ghosts converge in restless throngs beneath the endless rain
She dances with the flickering flames that never cease to bite
A twisted silhouette consumed by everlasting night

Her form ignites the blackened walls in spectral,
flickering light
Flames embrace her fragile shape, devouring every right
No ashes fall, no traces left, yet stone recalls her cries
A story etched in charred lament beneath the moon’s bleak eyes

The wind recalls her last descent, secrets folded in its breath
An echoing lament of grief, a curse that won’t know death
Her footsteps haunt the echo chamber, a refrain cold and clear
A spectral mark upon the earth, a terror drawing near

Beneath the moon’s pale watchful gaze,
her visage drifts and weeps
A ghostly figure bound to pain, where darkness tightly keeps
Forever lost within the fire, a soul refused release
Her tragic story burns anew in shadows’ cold caprice

The tunnel’s walls exhale despair,
soaked deep with sorrow’s stain
Each crack and crevice pulses with the memory of her pain
A haunted song of flame and fear that never quite expires
Her screams, a constant ember, buried in funeral pyres

No traveler walks unmarked, no visitor leaves unscarred
Within this cursed, charred refuge where her presence guards
The Screaming Tunnel’s silent flame, a horror etched in time
A ghost forever caught between the living and the crime

Her story lingers, endless, bound within this charred domain
A spectral blaze that flickers on in darkness and in pain
The tunnel weeps, and fire burns–an elegy of loss
Where flame and shadow intertwine, and hope forever’s tossed

The Second Time Around

You think you know the drill the second time you lose
The stages and the casseroles, the managed grief, the news
You tell your friends and family — you’ve been here before
Returned customer to loss, familiar with the chore

But then the new grief arrives and all your knowledge falls
The college of the previous don’t translate to these walls
This person, this relation, this rendering of pain
Requires its own curriculum, its own peculiar reign

The second time you lose someone you think you know
But you don’t — the knowledge of that first grief doesn’t show
You the way through this one, the this-one
Each loss its own accounting, its own cross to bear
The particular, the specific, the this-one there

The second loss is easier because you know the game
The mechanics of the mourning, the social and the personal frame
Already navigated waters where you nearly drowned
The second time you’re grieving, your survival’s already found

But second loss is harder — it’s compounded in the night
Fresh grief plus the echo of the first, the accumulated weight
Of a man who’s been here twice now, who carries both the pain
The door opens to a room where previous grief still reigns

And second loss recalibrates the way you see yourself
The narration of the self in relation to this shelf
Of accumulated endings, your developing relationship
With loss itself — the company you keep, the given and the gift

Each death its own education, each grave a different school
The first one taught you nothing for the second’s cruel rule
And when the third one comes around — and it will,
it always will —
You’ll be a returning student to the same unforgiving hill

The Second Wind

When the first surge of momentum had exhausted its reserves
and the body and the operation both ran out of nerve,
I sat down in the middle of the distance I had covered
and found inside the fatigue a second wind I had not discovered.

The second wind does not arrive until you push past
where you wanted,
past the point where comfort says you have already been haunted
by enough of the difficult, enough of the demanding,
the second wind is waiting for the man who keeps advancing.

There is no signal that it comes, no warning it approaches,
you are stumbling through the late stretch
when it finally coaches
something in the deeper reserve you did not know you carried,
and suddenly the weight you bore feels less than
where you tarried.

I have lived the second wind in business
and in personal endeavor,
every time I thought the limit was the limit, I found clever
reserves of forward motion that the early miles had buried
underneath the difficulty that I almost had not carried.

The Silk and the Bone

She learns my angles with her fingertips,
geography of spine and hip
while I map the pale terrain of her ribs,
the hollow where her collarbone dips.
We’re archaeologists of flesh tonight,
digging up what we bury by day,
uncovering teeth in the dark,
learning what we won’t say.

Her mouth is contradiction born,
gentle then sharp then gentle again.
I answer with my own paradox,
yielding into pressure that aches.
She bites my shoulder, leaves a bruise
I’ll show the world tomorrow.
Proof that tenderness and violence
share the same country of sorrow.

Silk wraps around bone and bone presses through silk.
We’re finding where surrender meets will.
Where the softest parts become the blade
and strength remembers how to bend.
and ruin and mend.
This is the argument bodies make
when language fails and only touch
can articulate what’s at stake.

She grabs my throat not to harm
but to feel my pulse defend.
To know I’m fully present,
tracking every breath, every end
of her wanting as it builds and breaks.
She pulls my hair. Demands more.
Demands less. Demands I stay within.

Her skin marks like fruit.
Mine shows where the flame has been.
We’re writing on each other
what can’t be spoken, only learned
through repetition and the calibration of
how hard is too hard
and how soft means we start again.

Afterward we’re courteous,
pass water, fix the pillows,
as if we weren’t just animals
whose rules collapsed so easily.
As if we’re not already counting down
to when the daylight ends
and we return to excavating
what the careful world offends.

The Simp Accusation

He said it loud by the soda machine,
like shame was a sport and he held the rings
He said it sharp with a sideways grin,
like hearts are jokes and love has strings
I’d just texted back, I’d just shown up,
I’d just kept faith with ordinary things
He called it “simp” like a court stamp,
like kindness is the crime it brings
We work all week under sun-bleached signs,
then drink at dusk to feel less caged
We watch the coast sell flawless faces,
watch men act hard to look un-aged
We turn soft care into a punchline,
then wonder why our homes feel razed
He laughed at me for holding steady,
like staying decent means mislaid
His buddies nodded like bobble heads,
rehearsed contempt like it was cool
Their voices rattled in the breakroom air,
a proud parade of borrowed rules
They worshiped distance, praised neglect,
called tenderness a sucker’s tool
Yet each one flinched at real silence,
each one feared being known as fool

Call me a simp, call me a joke,
I’ll take the word, I’ll take the smoke
You mock the hand that holds a hand,
then cry when every bridge is broke
You learn to sneer, you learn to score,
you learn to lock your hungry throat
I’d rather risk my pride in daylight than rot inside your macho cloak

We drove the freeway past dead malls,
past palms that clapped with dusty hands
He kept his mouth on “weak” and “soft,
” like mercy never understands
I watched the billboards promise power,
watched boys become their own demands
A man gets taught to starve in public,
then asked to lead when life expands
He told a story bout a woman,
called her “using,” called her “cheap”
He swore he never needed anyone, swore he never lost sleep
Yet every night his phone kept glowing,
and his stare went wide and deep
He wanted love like everyone wants air,
he just wanted it on the sneak
I thought of fathers who never hugged,
proud statues in a kitchen chair
I thought of friends who vanished fast,
then asked for loyalty out of thin air
I thought of how the tongue turns vicious
when the heart won’t do repair
Mocking affection is easy work,
it keeps your hands clean, keeps you bare

At the gas station, late and quiet,
he saw me buy her water, chips
He said “look at you,” like service kills,
like decency must bite its lips
I said nothing, kept my face calm,
let my silence draw its line and sit
He wanted me to beg forgiveness
for a care that doesn’t fit his script
I’ve seen the ones who brag the loudest fold
when sickness hits the house
I’ve seen the “alphas” lose their nerve
when grief comes stalking like a louse
I’ve seen the hard men call their mothers with a whisper in their mouth
Then show up next day, loud again,
selling steel they can’t arouse
If love is leverage, it turns rotten,
if love is theater, it dies fast
If love is only what you take, it leaves you hungry in the blast
I give what I can give on purpose,
no halo, no bargain, no contrast
He can keep his cheap applause,
I keep a pulse that’s built to last

One day he’ll sit in some dim parking lot,
hands on the wheel, eyes washed out
He’ll hear his own voice in his head,
and it won’t sound brave, it’ll sound like doubt
He’ll want a person close and honest,
not a crowd that cheers his drought
And I won’t gloat, I won’t preach,
I’ll just remember what the word was about
A label thrown to stop a man from touching what might keep him sane
A joke that trains a whole damn culture to confuse compassion with a stain
If loving her makes me “less,” fine,
I’ll be less of your small reign
I’ll be more of what she can trust,
and more of what I can explain

The Sound of Ending

There’s a frequency beneath the floorboards that only the dying can hear
It hums like transformers before they explode,
like vertebrae grinding in fear
I woke up with my teeth on the pillow
and something else wearing my face
Staring back from the bathroom mirror with my eyes
but nothing else in place
The walls are breathing in rhythm with a heart that isn’t mine
And the shadows move independent when I kill the power line
I hear the sound of ending, it’s tuning fork precision
The note that splits reality from comfortable collision
They told us we were safe here, they sold us numbered days
But the frequency’s ascending and it’s chewing through the glaze

Can you hear it, the machine beneath the meat
The gears that grind our sanity into something they can eat
This is the sound of ending, the hymn before the fall
When the nightmare breaks its leash and devours us all

My daughter spoke in backwards sentences for seven days last week
Describing futures that already happened in a language corpses speak
She drew pictures of the visitors who stand beside our beds
Counting down in languages composed of screaming instead
The news won’t cover disappearances
when the missing number millions
They just adjust the census and dispatch their bought opinion
But I’ve seen the trucks at midnight hauling cargo wrapped in plastic
Heard the screaming from the warehouses,
seen the smoke turn colors drastic

The sky’s been wrong for months now,
wrong color, wrong texture, wrong weight
Like someone stretched a photograph across the atmosphere
and stapled it in place
Birds don’t fly in formation anymore,
they spiral down like stones
And when you cut them open, there’s machinery in their bones
I found my neighbor in his kitchen, fork halfway to his mouth
Been sitting there for three weeks while his family moved about
Going through their routines around his rotting, rigid form
Like his permanent paralysis was perfectly the norm
The emergency broadcast plays a tone that makes your nose bleed
Instructions in a language that predates the human seed
They’re preparing us for harvest, they’re softening the meat
Teaching us to welcome the extinction that we’ll meet

Last night I watched my hands move without consulting me
They typed coordinates and blueprints I was never meant to see
Schematics for the architecture underneath our towns
The real city sprawling downward where the harvesters wear crowns
Made from vertebrae and fingernails of everyone who knew
The truth about the frequency before it swallowed them too
I hear the sound of ending and it’s singing me to sleep
Promising oblivion while the machinery won’t sleep

The Stanley Hotel, Colorado – Room 217

Under the Stanley’s looming gaze,
where the pines conspire and hush
Grand facade shivers in the blue of night,
moonlight slick as a blade’s rush
Windows flicker secrets, curtains breathing in the chill
Floorboards creak with memory, stairwells groan with will
Some say the walls remember every scream and secret kiss
That the very air grows heavy with every legend told amiss
Corridors stretch in endless gloom, old carpet bruised with stain
Whispers climb the wallpaper, ghostly laughter thick as rain
Shadows lengthen, doubling back, devouring every beam
The Stanley’s pulse is fevered, running wild beneath the dream

In the hush of the hallway, footsteps echo out of time
Shoes too light for flesh, too patient for a crime
Room 217 breathes hunger–locks rattle on their own
Keys turn in empty doorknobs, and no one sleeps alone
Here, the past sits up in bed, eyes hollowed by regret
Unfinished conversations, debts the living can’t forget
Objects drift across the dresser, a glass shudders in the gloom
A suitcase unpacks itself and fills the haunted room
Sheets twist with cold that isn’t air, but memory coming near
The dead have never left this place–they only linger here

Downstairs, the ballroom simmers, light flickering on the floor
Mirrors catch the movements of dancers lost in yore
A waltz unfolds for no one, dust swirling through the crowd
Phantoms in their finest, heads bent but never bowed
Each spin and dip is silent, save the rattle of the breeze
Yet music trails behind them, notes floating like disease
Sometimes the chandelier will tremble, glass chiming in the dark
As if the room itself remembers every lover, every mark
All the lost and desperate nights,
all the deals and dirty schemes
All are pressed between the boards and wound around their dreams

Welcome to your nightmare, where comfort turns to doubt
Where the lights stutter warnings that you shouldn’t figure out
Your shadow grows a backbone, learns to walk ahead
Something’s watching from the closet, underneath the bed
The scent of roses long dead drifts up through vent and seam
A woman’s voice, cold and cracked, cuts through any dream
Touch the mirror, feel it pulse–a surface never clean
A hundred faces flicker, sharp and cruel and mean
The air is always listening, the silence tastes of fear
In every corner of the Stanley, the past is always near

Some say King wrote of madness, but madness wrote him back
Dreams bled out onto pages, paint peeling on every crack
No matter who you are, or how brave you claim to be
There’s a part of you the hotel wants–a part you’ll never see
Night stretches longer here, the moon seems slow to rise
Dawn brings no mercy, only memories and lies
Once you check into this place, you check into your mind
And not everyone who wanders leaves their shadow behind
You’ll hear the suitcase sliding, the bed creak without touch
You’ll wake to icy breathing and a grip that’s just too much

Stand at the window, look out across the pines
The world beyond feels distant, cut off by ancient signs
Inside the Stanley, everything is real–every rumor, every fright
Room 217 is waiting, hungry for your night
Whispers never soften, footsteps never fade
This grand old haunted mansion was born to hold the shade
And when you leave, if you can, you’ll find you’re not alone
A piece of Stanley’s madness will follow you back home

The Stomach Remembers What the Mind Forgot

The stomach remembers what the mind forgot,
the exact heat of the parking lot
behind the rib joint where the smoke hung low
and thick as winter fog twenty years ago,
the stomach keeps a record that the brain can’t touch,
the muscle memory of too much and too much
and too much again, the body’s filing clerk
sorting every meal into the murk
of what I’ve carried with me all this time.

The stomach remembers every pantomime
of fullness I’ve performed, the loosened pants,
the walk around the block, the second chance
I gave myself before the second plate,
the stomach remembers and it doesn’t conflate
the good meals with the desperate ones, it knows
the difference between the feast and what arose
from loneliness, from boredom, from the need,
the stomach catalogues each specific feed.

The stomach remembers what the mind forgot,
every booth, every counter, every parking lot,
every 2 AM salvation from the cold,
the stomach remembers, getting old
is just the inventory growing long,
the stomach remembers every song
I’ve hummed while cooking, every late-night drive,
the stomach remembers I’m alive
because I fed it, fed it, never stopped,
the stomach remembers every crop
I’ve harvested from every table set,
the stomach remembers, won’t forget.

The mind moves on but the stomach holds the proof,
the scar tissue telling the truth
of every excess, every binge, every swear
I made to quit and didn’t, every prayer
I sent to no one while the grease congealed,
the stomach is the document, the sealed
and notarized account of who I’ve been,
the stomach remembers, thick and thin,
the stomach remembers — it was there for all of it,
the unimpeachable, reliable witness to the spit
and fire of the grill, the pot, the pan,
the stomach remembers the entire span
of this consuming life, the full report,
the stomach remembers every single sort
of hunger I’ve invented just to eat,
the stomach remembers the defeat
and the victory were always the same bite,
the stomach remembers through the night.

The Sympathy Card

Hallmark makes fifteen hundred versions of the thing,
each one aiming at a different kind of loss,
but all of them attempting the impossible spring
of language across the gap, the albatross
of having to say something when there’s nothing
that the language has for what has just occurred.
I stood in the aisle for twenty minutes stuffing
through the options and selected an absurd
abstraction of a sunset and the words
in deepest sympathy emblazoned there.

The sympathy card is the language of the helpless,
the honest admission that we’re almost speechless
in the face of what has happened to the ones we care for,
it’s the best that the commercial world can score for
the language of the helpless and the speechless.

But I’ve kept every card I’ve ever gotten
in a box that sits inside the closet still,
the ones that said what couldn’t be forgotten,
the handwritten notes that filled
the margins with specific memory:
I remember when he told me about the fishing trip,
I remember the way he’d laugh at me,
I remember his handshake and his grip.

The sympathy card is not enough and is enough,
it’s the gesture that says: I acknowledge what you’re in,
it’s the arrival of something through the envelope’s rough
closure, a message from outside the skin
of grief that says: the world is still aware
that you exist and that you’re hurting now,
that someone thought to stop and show they care
and paid three dollars for the paper somehow.

The Things I’ve Forgotten

I’ve forgotten the sound of his laugh,
which is the thing I fear most —
Not the photographs, not the ghost
Of the memory in the specific locations,
But the specific oscillations
Of his laugh — the specific rhythm
And frequency and the whim
Of what made it come out, what made it fully his.

I remember that he laughed often and easily —
The character of the laugh I remember, breezily
Confident and fully present, the laugh
Of a man comfortable enough to laugh —
But the specific sound of it, the actual acoustic
Of the laugh, is losing its music
In the five years of the absence.

I’ve forgotten the sound of his laugh, which is the grief
I didn’t expect — the specific brief
Recording in the memory going dark
Not all at once but in the specific arc
Of the fade, the gradual attenuation
Of the acoustic memory, the narration
Of the voice going from specific to general.

I’ve been going through the videos on the phone —
There are three, which is three more than none alone,
Three ordinary recordings from ordinary occasions
That caught his laugh in the equations
Of the amateur video — and I’ve been listening
To the specific sound of it, glistening
In the recording, retrieving the actual from the fading memory.

And the specific is still in the recording — the specific
Register, the vernacular
Quality of the laugh — and the retrieval
Of the specific from the video is medieval
In its particularity, the listening
To the recording as the christening
Of the actual back into the present.

The specific forgetting is the secondary grief —
The loss of the loss itself, the relief
And the horror of the memory’s attenuation,
The specific narration
Of a person growing more general in the mind
Of the person who loved them, the find
Of the video as the specific’s last defender.

The Unfinished Crossword

Folded in quarters on the nightstand,
pencil tucked inside the crease.
Fourteen across: a seven-letter word
for the opposite of peace.
He had gotten twelve of them. The rest
were blank, the grid half-dark, half-white,
a mind interrupted mid-solution,
a brain switched off mid-fight
with a clue that would have come to him
by morning, would have surfaced
in the shower or the truck,
the answer rising to the surface
the way they always did for him—
delayed but guaranteed, a slow-fuse man
who never rushed a puzzle or a meal
or a handshake or a plan.

Fourteen across is still unanswered.
The pencil is going dull.
And I have tried to finish it for him
but my head is too thick, too full
of the wrong kind of knowing—
I know the weight of the casket lid,
I know the cost of the burial plot,
I know exactly what he did
on his last good day of living,
but I cannot solve fourteen across
and the not-knowing is a splinter
driven sideways through the loss.

The newspaper is yellowing.
The date on top reads like a scar—
the last morning he sat upright,
the last time he got that far
into the ritual: coffee, toast,
the crossword spread across his knee,
the pencil sharpened with a knife
the way his father taught, debris
of graphite curled on the blanket
like the shavings from a life
pared down to its essentials:
a word, a clue, a pencil and a wife
who slept beside him while he worked
the grid in silence, every dawn,
who did not know the morning that she woke
and found the crossword and the man both gone.

I keep it in the nightstand drawer.
Folded the same way, pencil tucked.
I have bought the same paper every day since then
and worked the crossword, dumb and stuck
on half the clues the way I always was—
he was the clever one, the quick,
the mind that bent around a problem
like a river bends past brick—
and I leave fourteen across blank
in every single one I do,
a white square held in perpetuity,
an unsolved space for what I never knew
and what he never got to tell me
and what the silence keeps instead:
a seven-letter word for the opposite of peace.
I think the answer might be buried.
I think the answer might be ceased.

The Unfurnished Face

The tubes of artificial health are standing in a row
I’ve opted for the actual
the terrifying low
My skin is just a document of every wasted year
A cartography of boredom and the very local fear

I crossed the threshold with my naked
raw and grayish cheek
To find if the world is as cruel as the mirrors speak
The porcelain was witness to a quiet
bitter crime
I’ve stopped my contributions to the industry of time

My eyelashes are stunted and my chin erupts in red
I’m displaying for the public exactly what I’ve shed

Oh
the horror of existing as a face without the paint
I’m lacking the illusion and the posture of a saint
I’m a clinical disaster
dull and porous and exposed
A chapter of the history that should have stayed closed
I’m walking to the corner with my vanity in shreds
While everyone is counting up the ghosts within their heads

The supermarket is a hall of cold and jagged glass
I watch the simulated and the beautiful ones pass
They have the symmetry that I no longer care to buy
A heavy and expensive and a structural white lie

The cashier is a child and her eyes are like a threat
She hasn’t met the full inventory yet
Of wrinkles gathering like dust upon the floor
I’m a relic of a person who isn’t needed anymore

I’m a biological event within a world of slick
The absence of my powder is a desperate fucking trick
I feel like a cathedral with the roofing ripped away
Exposing all the rot to the indifferent light of day

Oh
the horror of existing as a face without the paint
I’m lacking the illusion and the posture of a saint
I’m a clinical disaster
dull and porous and exposed
A chapter of the history that should have stayed closed
I’m walking to the corner with my vanity in shreds
While everyone is counting up the ghosts within their heads

The hollow of my throat is a dry and thirsty ditch
Between the sagging chest and the nervous
local twitch
I thought I was a fortress but I’m only a wet wall
Waiting for the hammer of the evening time to fall

There is no secret holiness in a plain and unmarked face
Just the oxygen that’s filling up a vacant
darker space
I’ll crawl back to the bedroom through the cold and biting rain
And wash away the logic of this localized
sharp pain

The mask is a heavy weight that I am prepared to resume
But for three hours I was haunting every fucking room

The Vigil

I have been keeping the vigil through the long and patient years,
The vigil of the cold and of the deliberate and the fears,
That the moment would pass before the preparation was complete,
And the vigil is the patience of the man who will not retreat.

Not the vigil of the grief but the vigil of the plan,
The vigil of the cold and the deliberate and the man,
Who chose to wait because the waiting was the right
and strategic,
And the vigil is the patience of the arctic and the logic.

The vigil, the long and cold and patient keeping of the watch,
The vigil, the discipline of the cold and the notch,
Of every passing day added to the record of the held,
The vigil is the patience and the patience is the spell.

Cast over the fury in the cold and in the deliberate wait,
The vigil is the cold I chose across the years of late,
And early and the middle of the long accumulation,
And the vigil is the patience of the full reckoning nation.

I have kept the vigil through conditions that were hard,
I have kept the vigil when the patient and the scarred,
Alternative of the immediate would have been the easy choose,
And the vigil is the choice I made to keep the cold and lose.

The vigil ends with the arrival of the calculated day,
The vigil ends when the patient has completed the relay,
Of the baton from the held to the deliberate release,
And the vigil is the patience and the vigil ends in peace.

The Waiting Season

The waiting season is different in the year after recovery,
it carries the memory and the discovery
of how close the last one came, which sharpens every wait
into a keener thing, which is the recovery’s specific trait.

The waiting season with a full grain store is still a wait,
the waiting season with the memory of the empty plate
is the waiting season with an edge that full doesn’t remove,
which is the after-famine’s permanent groove.

We check the stores twice what we used to, which is the village’s
collective anxiety expressed in the privileges
of the after, which is checking twice a day instead of once,
which is counting what was there the day before for once.

The young people find this excessive and they’re right,
the young people who didn’t live through the previous night
of the crisis find the counting and the checking neurotic,
and from their position in the after it’s quixotic.

We check the stores twice because the last time we were wrong
about the adequacy and the year was too long,
which is the explanation and the justification
and also the wound that time will close with patience.

The waiting season is shorter every year in the after,
not in the calendar but in the rafter
of the specific dread that sits above the waiting,
which is receding as the stores keep demonstrating.

The Wake

They laid him out in the front room like the old days called for,
the flowers on the casket and the neighbors filing past,
the whiskey on the table and the old sad stories shared for
the man who’d held the room whenever he was last
to leave a gathering, who told the same four stories
every time and everyone pretended not to know
the endings, who had earned his catalog of glories
of the ordinary kind that ordinary men bestow.

At the wake we tell the stories of the living,
we put the best face forward and keep giving
the man a chance to be himself one final time through us,
the laughter and the crying making no fuss
at the wake we tell the stories of the living.

My aunt arrived at midnight from three states away
and told the one about the car and the ditch,
and everyone around the table started to sway
with the laughter of it, every particular niche
of the record hitting in the right familiar place,
and for a moment he was in the room again,
the record was his presence and his face,
the wake its own communion of the men
and women who had known him at his best and worst.

The Irish invented it or so they claim,
the keeping company with the body through the night,
the drinking and the crying all the same,
the long vigil of the grief done right.
I understand it now in ways I couldn’t at twenty:
the wake is not for the dead but for the living,
the gathering the thing we keep in plenty
to prove to ourselves we are still giving
life its full attention past the loss.

The War Photographer

She came in on a press pass with a camera at her chest,
and the soldiers watched her move through it like someone past the rest,
she framed the broken buildings and the children at the wall,
and she pressed the shutter on the things that no one wants to call.

There is an argument about the ethics of the photograph,
whether bearing witness is a kind of aftermath,
but she keeps a certain distance and the lens becomes the space,
between the tragedy and what the editors have to face.

The war photographer sees what the rest of us cannot bear,
the war photographer carries it all back in a square,
a frame of silver and of shadow, forty millimeters wide,
the war photographer brings the distant inside,
and the paper runs the image and the people shake their head,
and the war photographer goes back to photograph the dead,
because someone has to witness it and someone has to show,
what the flags and the speeches leave out of the flow.

I asked her once if she could sleep after a day out in the field,
she said sleep was just a thing you did
when nothing else was real,
she said the camera is a contract that she signed
when she was young,
to carry back the image that the living left undone.

She ships the hard drive on the transport
and she takes the next flight in,
and I think about the kind of weight that kind of work puts in,
the war photographer sees it all and frames it for the rest,
and leaves a piece of every war inside her chest.

The Watcher’s Shadow

In the corner of a darkened room, a shadow watches,
full of gloom, haunted by the watcher’s dread.
Eyes that glow with an eerie light, filling the heart with endless fright,
Whispers creep from the silent dark,
marking the soul with a phantom’s mark.
Hands that reach from the unseen, pulling at the soul’s unseen,
A heart that races with each beat,
lost in the watcher’s silent heat.
In the shadows where watchers lie, every breath a silent cry,
a soul caught in the watcher’s wink.
Lost in a world of unseen dread, haunted by what lies ahead,
A life consumed by endless fright,
trapped in the watcher’s silent night.
A scream that echoes in the mind, leaving the soul lost and blind,
Eyes that peer with haunting gaze,
filling the heart with endless haze.
Steps that follow in the night, dragging the mind into fright,
A soul adrift in the watcher’s shadow,
lost in a world of endless woe.

The Weight of Staying

He stayed because the leaving took a kind of will he’d misplaced,
somewhere in the years of this the will got repositioned, erased
by the incremental settling that feels like nothing at the time
but adds up to a man who lost the will to make the climb.

The house is good enough, the job is adequate, the life
is managed at a level that’s sufficient, and the wife
is not unhappy — or at least no more unhappy than the baseline
of a woman married to a man who’s living on the flatline.

The weight of staying is the weight of everything he chose
to keep instead of losing, and the weight of what he knows —
that the choosing to stay put was its own kind of giving in,
and the weight of staying starts
where the fighting stops to begin.

They have their routines, the comfortable and worn —
the weekend rituals, the way the week is borne
from one familiar structure to the next without a gap
that might require them to navigate without the map.

The map is drawn in years of the same choices in the same
positions and the same responses to the same, the same —
and the map is very detailed and extremely well maintained,
and the man who drew it doesn’t need the territory explained.

He had his moments of considering the other life —
the alternate arrangements, the imagined other wife,
the city somewhere else, the job that didn’t eat the daylight —
these thoughts would come at three a.m.
and be gone by the grey light.

He stopped entertaining them around the time the youngest
started high school — the math became the loudest
argument for staying in the structure he had built —
and the fantasy dissolved into a manageable guilt.

The guilt has faded too, in time, the way guilt fades
when it goes unfed by any new infractions or crusades —
now it’s just the life, the structure, the routine, the known,
a man inside a house he built with the specific stone

of all the careful choosing and the careful not-choosing,
of all the staying and the quiet, measured not-losing —
a man who’s comfortable with comfortable and fine with fine,
who draws the map of his existence on the same old line.

His daughter called last week and asked him what he’s been doing,
and he told her about the yard work
and the car he’s been reviewing
for replacement, and the news, and the neighbor’s renovation —
and she listened with the patience of a loving generation.

She doesn’t ask about his inner life, and he doesn’t offer it —
the transaction of the phone call has its own specific fit,
the warmth without the depth, the care without the excavation —
and the weight of staying fills the space of every conversation.

The weight of staying is the weight he lifted when he chose,
when he woke up at forty-five and took stock of the rows
of choices in his rearview and decided this was it —
the weight of staying is the weight of choosing where to sit.

The staying isn’t nothing — it requires its own maintenance,
the daily re-commitment to the structure and its governance —
a man who stays has chosen and a man who chooses lives —
and the weight of staying is the weight the choosing gives.

The woman he stays with has her own arrangements with the staying
—
they’ve negotiated separately the terms of the not-going,
and the terms overlap enough to make the structure work —
the marriage of two stayers has a dignity, a quirk

of its specific honesty — neither one pretending —
just two people in the weight of staying, never fully mending
the original fracture in the dream they came with —
and the weight of staying is the weight they both live with.