75 Darkness poems

They have little use. They are best as objects of torment. No government cares what you do with them. Like birds, and yet so human . . . They mate by briefly looking at the other. Their eggs are like white jellybeans. Sometimes they have been said to inspire a man to do more with his life than he might have. But what is there for a man to do with his life? . . . They burn beautifully with a blue flame. When they cry out it is like the screech of a tiny hinge; the cry of a bat. No one hears it . . .

The Devil’s tour of hell did not include a factory line where molten lead spilled into mouths held wide, no electric drill spiraling screws into hands and feet, nor giant pliers to lower you into simmering vats. Instead, a circle of light opened on your stuffed armchair, whose chintz orchids did not boil and change, and the Devil adjusted your new spiked antennae almost delicately, with claws curled and lacquered black, before he spread his leather wings to leap into the acid-green sky. So your head became a tv hull, a gargoyle mirror. Your doppelganger sloppy at the mouth and swollen at the joints enacted your days in sinuous slow motion, your lines delivered with a mocking sneer. Sometimes the frame froze, reversed, began again: the red eyes of a friend you cursed, your girl child cowered behind the drapes, parents alive again and puzzled by this new form. That’s why you clawed your way back to this life.

The shift of sleepwalks and suicides. The occasion of owls and a demi-lune fog. Even God has nodded off And won't be taking prayers til ten. Ad interim, you put them on. As if your wants could keep you warm. As if. You say your shibboleths. You thumb your beads. You scry the glass. Night creeps to its precipice And the broken rim of reason breaks Again. An obsidian sky betrays you. Every serrate shadow flays you. Soon enough, the crow will caw. The cock will crow. The door will close. (He isn't coming back, you know.) And so wee, wet hours of grief relent. In thirty years you might forget Precisely how tonight's pain felt. And in whose black house you dwelt.

I used to be afraid of long dark evenings now they feel like mine i own the long dark now we have an understanding it stays, i stay we don't explain ourselves

The shadows in the old house move in ways shadows shouldn't i've learned to respect them not everything needs to be explained