In my childhood midnight fancies, many a time I ventured out into the darkness when my household slept soundly. Barefoot upon the cold sand of a beloved shoreline, I used to dance entranced to the ghostly moonlight as each rustling wave gradually stole me away from the family’s farmhouse into the mysteries of my tender age.
It was thus how I found her – sickly, unsettling, and unsuspectedly enthralling. The weeper of the bleeding wound emitted no sound, yet her tears flowed as burning screams down her dismal deep blood eyes. By manner of vesture, this almost tangible specter bore the seeming of grace deposed with the tattered blues of a royal born. With arms spread to the sides as she knelt semi-buried in the sand, the very flow of life trickled from her open back.
—Are you lost? —Transfixed in quiet wretchedness, this ethereal sufferer bade no answer still. Tip-toeing around the blood ring, I stopped to look at the injury. The stench of burnt skin and remnants of raven feathers suffocated my senses as they held threshold for a large clean and beating cut. A sticky and moist sorrow extended through my limbs, gripping my chest as though her pain pertained to me. In an impulse, I stretched my arm to touch the woman’s back, yet the wind blew furiously, and dreary clouds hung above our heads heralding the end of quiescence’s reign.
—Love’s the sepulture of hearts! — The ghost shrieked, bolting from the sand as she cast the mask of despondency upon my young eyes. Her icy clawed hands seized my neck and held me high above her shoulders, where the air grew heavy and her jet-black hair swayed defying the gravity of the Earth.
By virtue of my struggle to breathe, the woman let me on my feet with a blank stare and held me to her bosom with increasing capacity. My body wept and whined as the enfolding into such a touch seared my insides; for as the spectre sank her claws into my back, the words she bespoke were the tombstone of secular dazzling and the onset of a skeleton garden, “The key to lunacy is bound by thirteen plus seven divided by two”.
The utterance of the crushing composition proved to be somewhat of a relief to the grieving phantom, yet the opposite for me; for the figure demorphed into a goo which oozed itself in through my pores, and since that night, I dwelt close yet far away from home.
“You are one to abhor attachments that, like chains, hold you to an immutable terrain of flesh-eating corpses, yet by contradiction of your modus operandi, you launch against the Maiden of Oblivion with stark acrimony.”
~*~
“I see that being left alone with me has set your talents free. Do you enjoy what you see? Let all who have eyes to see and all ears to hear how all difference and manners come to be. Yes, I abhor her whose promise is weak, as I do loathe the haze of dormancy, yet that hardly makes me a hypocrite. You see, in my centuries alive, I have never measured progress through the eclipse and dearth of consciousness. I am the mindful memory who propels forward with sentient step, crafting jewels out of events that nothing may go to waste. I accept my responsibility toward myself, and erect pillars of serving grace. I forgo surrendering war to the deceitful bliss of forgetfulness, and embrace the shadows born from my ancient crevices.”
The Nocturnal Versifier 