Ghost Writer's Lament: Misc Poems

Winter’s Doom (2007)

The midnight air is choked with frost and bone,

A frozen world where I must stare alone.

No hollow grief or shadow can compare,

To lightless voids and cold, unyielding air.

Beneath the velvet dark, I court my end,

With every frigid breath the winter sends.

I’ve glimpsed the veil, or so the silence seems,

A prisoner to these cursed and fevered dreams.

A sudden shiver broke the thunderous crash,

I reached the glass with a desperate, frantic dash.

Midst jagged sparks and blinding, white-hot light,

There fell my fallen, once-resplendent knight.

I pulled the shards of crystal from his head,

And felt the pulse of one I painted dead.

His '89 Mustang, a wreck against the pole

A twisted cage of steel to claim his soul.

I thought the dark had stolen back my love,

And cursed the silent, frozen stars above.

But in this gloom, a sharper hunger thrives;

The winter’s doom is where our ghost survives,

In fractured echoes of our former lives.

He knows my face, he knows the name I bear,

But sees the world through fog and thinning air.

I am his anchor in the shifting grey,

The only thing that time won't wash away.

But simple words fall through his mind like sand

The paper towels, the glass within his hand.

If not performed within the heartbeat,

The task is swallowed by the cold’s retreat.

I write him memos, pinned against the wall,

To catch the thoughts before they start to fall.

"Buy bread," "The keys," "The furnace light is low,"

The paper trail of all he used to know.

He reads them with a heavy, haunted brow,

Chained to a fleeting, desperate, "here and now."

It’s not his soul that’s gone, but just the thread,

That weaves the day inside his wounded head.

I watch him blink, a shadow in the room,

Trapped in the static of the winter's doom.

I tell him once, then tell him once again,

The ink is darker than my lonely pen.

He loves me still, of that, I have no doubt

But minute by minute, the lights keep flickering out..

I wrote this about my husband’s accident and the reality of living with TBI (Traumatic Brain Injury). He is doing well and is back at work, but our daily life now includes constant memos and reminders for the things that slip away. This is about the frustration and the love that remains when the "short-term" fails.

Abandoned (1998)

The sadness consumes me, a hollow decree, I’m searching for light that I’ll nevermore see. I watch as the midnight descends on the clay, To swallow the earth and to wither the day. Where is the Maker, the bringer of breath, Who birthed such a girth but to leave it to death? The vastness was given, a gift gone to waste, Now ash is the only dark flavor I taste.

The loneliness bitters the blood in my veins, As I wither away in these invisible chains. Into the nothing, I’m sinking so deep, With promises broken that I couldn't keep. I speak without bluffing, no mask for my face, As I’m swept from the world without leaving a trace. The end is approaching, a predator’s song, Where the shadows are heavy and the winters are long.

The cold wind has spoken, a voice like the stone, Stating so boldly that we are alone. No warmth for the weary, no spirit to guide, Just the echoing hollow where we used to hide. The verdict is written, the sentence is handed: In the heart of the dark, we are all… Abandoned.

The Solar Slaughter (2019)

The night descends in velvet tides, as if the sun were slain,
To wash away the heat of day and leave the mark of Cain.
Our hollow chests are silent now, for soulless are we all,
Just shadows cast in silhouette against a crumbling wall.
The understanding that you seek, the light for which you lust,
Is but a flare that turns to ash and settles in the dust;
It flickers once in frantic grief, then withers in the hiss
Of cold and dark dimensions in the bottomless abyss.

All hope must surely perish here, like petals in the frost,
The map of every dream we held is permanently lost.
Your soul it thrives no more, my love it withered at the root,
And we are left to taste the rind of bitter, blackened fruit.
How could you fail to understand? How could you not perceive,
The web of dark deception that the weeping shadows weave?
They circle us with jagged cries, their tears like falling lead,
To mourn the living spirits that are numbered with the dead.

We fall beneath the heavy weight of skies that will not wake,
For every vow we offered up was only meant to break.
The sun is cold and murdered now, a crown of blackened thorn,
Leaving us to wander in a world that’s never born.
The shadows are our kin today, they whisper of our fall,
While silence is the only ghost that answers to our call.