Shadows slide in this midnight mist,
Where the whispers embrace me
And tendrils of moonlight
Play with my hair.
Sleep, cold and heavy,
Presses on my heart,
And its fingers close my eyelids
As I wait for the ferryman.

A metal tang in the ozone air
Teases my tongue
As if I taste the blood from
The lip that I keep biting.
Too tired to wander,
Too distraught to sleep,
Here roll the tears of the century past
Down my salt-dried cheeks.
I long to reach for you
And I fear your gaze,
Your touch,
And your stinging kindness.

I should die in this pearly darkness
And run away into Sheol with these
Sliding, void-eyed shadows,
But to wrench myself away
From that microscopic grain of hope that
Keeps me here and bleeding
Into the soil of this
Endlessly fallow ground
Hurts more.

I didn't think it could
But it can.

Would that it had worked
And I had found the courage.
Would that all I know had gone,
And the hum of the abyss
Had swallowed me whole
Instead of biting and ripping out chunks.

They say the sky is darkest just before the dawn.
But the noonday sun is darker still,
For the ugly horrors can be poked with sticks
And this wood is too wet for burning.

Claws of the raging beast,
Rip this outer flesh and feast on the rotting tatters
Of a diseased and broken shell of fearing flesh.

Tie back my hair and cut it off;
Bind these fingers from spilling too many words
And hold the tongue that raises the dead and the forgotten.

Sliding shadows dance textures round my pain
And I have no map or torch to read in this forest.