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Completing the Pattern by Michael R. Burch Walk with me now, among the transfixed dead who kept life’s compact and who thus endure harsh sentence here?among pink-petaled beds and manicured green lawns. The sky’s azure, pale blue once like their eyes, will gleam blood-red at last when sunset staggers to the door of each white mausoleum, to inquire? What use, O things of erstwhile loveliness? Reclamation by Michael R. Burch after Robert Graves, with a nod to Mary Shelley I have come to the dark side of things where the bat sings its evasive radar and Want is a crooked forefinger attached to a gelatinous wing. I have grown animate here, a stitched corpse hooked to electrodes. And night moves upon me?progenitor of life with its foul breath. Blind eyes have their second sight and still are deceived. Now my nature is softly to moan as Desire carries me swooningly across her threshold. Stone is less infinite than her crone’s gargantuan hooked nose, her driveling lips. I eye her ecstatically?her dowager figure, and there is something about her that my words transfigure to a consuming emptiness. We are at peace with each other; this is our venture? swaying, the strings tautening, as tightropes tauten, as love tightens, constricts to the first note. Lyre of our hearts’ pits, orchestration of nothing, adits of emptiness! We have come to the last of our hopes, sweet as congealed blood sweetens for flies. Need is reborn; love dies. Deliver Us ... by Michael R. Burch The night is dark and scary? under your bed, or upon it. That blazing light might be a star ... or maybe the Final Comet. But two things are sure: your mother’s love and your puppy’s kisses, doggonit! the Horror by Michael R. Burch the Horror lurks inside our closets the Horror hides beneath our beds the Horror hisses ancient curses the Horror whispers in our heads the Horror tells us Death is coming the Horror tells us there’s no hope the Horror tells us “life” is futile the Horror beckons, “there’s the Rope!” Belfry by Michael R. Burch There are things we surrender to the attic gloom: they haunt us at night with shrill, querulous voices. There are choices we made yet did not pursue, behind windows we shuttered then failed to remember. There are canisters sealed that we cannot reopen, and others long broken that nothing can heal. There are things we conceal that our anger dismembered, gray leathery faces the rafters reveal. Duet by Michael R. Burch Oh, Wendy, by the firelight, how sad! How worn and gray your auburn hair became! You’re very silent, like an evening rain that trembles on dark petals. Tears you’ve shed for days we laughed together, glisten now; your flesh became translucent; and your brow knits, gathered loosely. By the well-made bed three portraits hang with knowing eyes, beloved, but mine is not among them. Time has proved our hearts both strangely mortal. If I said I loved you once, how is it that could change? And yet I watch you fondly; love is strange . . . Oh, Peter, by the firelight, how bright my thought of you remains, and if I said I loved you once, then took him to my bed, I did it for the need of love, one night when you were far away. My heart endured transfigurement?in flaming ash inured to heartbreak and the violence of sight: I saw myself grow old and thin and frail with thinning hair about me, like a veil . . . And so I loved him for myself, despite the love between us?our first startled kiss. But then I loved him for his humanness. And then we both grew old, and it was right . . . Oh, Wendy, if I fly, I fly beyond these human hearts, these cities walled and tiered against the night, beyond this vale of tears, for love, if it exists, dies with the years . . . No, Peter, love is constant as the heart that keeps till its last beat a measured pace and sets the fixtures of its dreams in place by beds at first well-used, at last well-made, and counts each face a joy, each tear a grace . . . Horror by Michael R. Burch What I ache to say is beyond saying? no words for the horror of not loving enough, like a mummy half-wrapped in its moldering casements holding a lily aloft. No, there are no words for the horror as a tormented wind howls through the teetering floes and the cold freezes down to my clawed hairy toes ... What use to me, now, if the stars appear? As I moan the moon finds me, fangs goring the deer. Strange Corps(e) by Michael R. Burch We are all dying, haunted by life? dying, but the living will not let us go. We are perishing zombies, haunted by the moonglow. With what animation we, shuffling, return nightly, to worry Love’s worm-eaten corpse, till, living or dead, she is wholly ours. We are the dying, enamored of “life”? the palest of auras, the eeriest call. We stagger to attention ... stumble ... fall. We have only one thought?Love’s peculiar notion, that our duty’s to “live,” though such “living” means night’s horrific wild hungers, its stranger dreams. We now “live” on the flesh of eroded dreams and no longer recoil at the victims’ screams. Love, ah! serene ghost by Michael R. Burch Love, ah! serene ghost, haunts my retelling of her, or stands atop despairing stairs with such pale, severe eyes, I become another pallid specter. But what I feel most profoundly is this: the absolute lack of her kiss, the absence of her wild, unwarranted laughter. So that, like a candle deprived of oxygen, I become mere wick and tallow again. Here and hereafter ... gone with her now, in the darkest of nights, the flame! I lie, pallid vision of man?the same wan ghost of her palpitations’ claim on my heart that I was before. I love her beyond and despite even shame. Keywords/Tags: Halloween, supernatural, dark, scary, horror, surreal, magic, gothic
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