Halloween

This is from a couple of years back. It's not strictly about the holiday, though it was written around that time period, and elements of it color the scenery of the backstory, forever under lock and key.


Apocalypse rise, bathe in phantom hue,
illuminate ways for the unseen.
Look past autumn’s artistry and witness
no ghost descend.
Marbled thought stands watch,
whispers a prophecy in shame: the silhouette
will disappear before first sight,
melt in the summer of the underworld.

Light in league with the dark –
a libation beneath the heavens to beseech the season,
all for the tongue of whom is on the throne of blood,
all for the mouth of the one.
To clean the foulness in my heart,
barren chambers pump away to the dirt –
a dirge echoes over an earth
emptied of flesh and hope.

Lonely blades radiate through panes,
patterns roam temples of dust
where I recite tempered fables, where cold breezes blow
shadows outside, my bed.
Solitary flights fancy the stars,
Cassiopeia where I wished you’d be.
But I only see dreaming trees, moss in slumber,
Faustian pleas humble at the feet of the deaf –

equilibrium crash on broken masonry,
rubble feeding dew-haunted thistles.
Vaulted harmonies are buried,
soon to be joined by vain recollections
as you travel to cities in new lands,
peopled by thieves, a village fête, the hangèd man
and a coward who clings to forgeries read in the leaves –
the living dead.