Taylor Reese Poet Free verse

Headless Mantis-Worship

Höfuðlauss Mantolatry (Headless Mantis-Worship):

Hold a conch shell,
They said I could hear the ocean.
Yet I don't need one,
To drown.
I don't need one to drift away,
Lost..... unbeknownst to the waves or myself.

Clawing at the shoreline,
Trying to get a grip.
But my fingers only close on emptiness........
Oh, but sweet surrender—
The final hitch in my breath,
And I'm gone......as everything grows cold.

Just another stone to sink when skipped,
Whispering with a lisp I speak of death.
Yet I tell you now,
Till it happens you don't know the truest peace.

Smoothed out by tides of memories that persist,
This is when identity shifts.
Like jagged glass,
The past once cut.
But even now......that lost its touch.

Coalescent stitches in a canvas of skin,
This is the macrame of drowning in identity dissolution.
Rip out my veins,
The missing thread.
The ink upon the page,
The singular self is dead.
And yet I watch as Mr. Grim just walks away.
Eh.....what did I expect?

Here I walk with ghosts beneath the bridge to Gleymisheimr,
Under a lavender moon in the sky of laudanum—
Trapped between breathing and drowning.
Quicksilver lips dripping with mercury—
As I surpassed the veil and held my tongue.


Even now they say I'm odd,
Praying to the severed head—
The mantis skull became a God.
My final prayer to silence,
Lifted high.

Living life so dead inside,
But I can't feel it.
Numbed out like a skeleton,
And I can't cry.

          ~Æris~

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Alison A Smith October 5, 2026 at 2:02 PM This is a haunting, immersive free-verse piece whose fractured pauses, ellipses, and shifting imagery enact the very identity dissolution it explores. The movement from oceanic surrender to skin, thread, ghosts, and the startling mantis-god image creates a surreal, mythic interior landscape—darkly beautiful, intimate, and unsettling. The closing numbness lands with particular force after the poem’s fevered symbolic intensity.