Where Shadows Hold Their Prey

04 Thursday Dec 2025

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The morning drags its shadow cross the floor,
My mirror pales before my semblance appears.
A faint unrest attends the waiting door—
Its breath recalls the dread of vanished years.

The toast grows cold, untouched beside the plate,
The day unfolds yet fails to pierce the gloom.
Beneath the bright delusion, dark truths percolate,
A cryptic rhythm that tolls impending doom.

The curtains droop like veils of some old rite,
Their shadows clutch at joys that slipped away.
A tarnished pane reflects a sorrowful sight—
A weary soul resigning to slow decay.

My shoes exhale their dust upon the stair,
Their soles resist the paths they once pursued.
A shadow lingers, silent and threadbare—
A curse no mortal tongue could ever soothe.

A child’s clear call slices the veiling rain,
Its warmth too fierce for hands grown stiff and numb.
It echoes like a knell through vaulted pain,
Where bonds once formed, no solace will come.

The clock forgets the purpose of its hands,
The hours congeal like footprints in the mire.
I drift through thought where thought no more commands,
To shores where neither grief nor hope conspire.

Each night I ghost the voices that would plead,
My phone’s screen a dim, receding island light.
Unread good mornings haunt the silent feed,
Like SOS signals falling out of sight.

And when the dawn bleeds into hollow grey,
I stir, soon drawn where shadows hold their prey.

The Merciful Dark

03 Wednesday Dec 2025

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“I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.” ~ Poe

They say my mind has sunk too far below,
That I have crossed where reason fears to tread,
But madness holds me fast in its undertow—
It’s daylight’s logic filling my soul with dread.

In lunacy I wander without weight,
Where shattered hours drift like ash on eaves,
The world unthreads; I fade and dissipate—
And sorrow is a guest who never leaves.

When suddenly the veil snaps, hard and clear,
And I recall each face that I have lost,
A white, unblinking truth pierces through my fear—
I reckon, one by one, each mortal cost.

In lucid hours I sift through years that fray,
The letters left unsent, the vows I broke,
I watch my former self slowly drain away
And mourn him like a name no longer spoke.

Sanity descends like winter’s knife,
Flaying every fiction I have worn;
It reveals what I’ve fashioned of this life—
A man who kneels in silence, raw, forlorn.

So let me slip back through that silver seam,
Where memory bleeds to rain-washed, ghostly grey,
Where I can live inside a kinder dream
And watch the hard, cold world drift away.

They call it sickness, this untethered state,
They minister with tonics and with scorn,
But they will never know the crushing weight
Of waking lucid, shattered, and outworn.

So let me be unraveled, let me go
Into the dark where gentle madness waits,
For those who see too clearly come to know—
That truth bears wounds no mercy can abate.

Winter’s Verdict

02 Tuesday Dec 2025

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Earth’s fevered heartbeat yearns for deeper rest,
Its rhythm slowing with the falling snow;
The fields lie still, hands folded on their breast,
Resigned to sleep where only roots may go.

The frost inscribes its ancient scripture on the pane,
Its verses vanish as the warmth recedes;
A ghost hand sketches omens we can’t name
In petroglyphs that only winter reads.

Walls cradle darkness as a second skin,
Curtains recall a warmth that will not come;
The air is patient, folding silence in
As hearths dissolve to shadow, one by one.

Each barren bough becomes a sculpted grief,
Exquisite in its hunger for the light;
The wind, a pale curator of belief,
Archives the lost confessions of the night.

The body bows to winter’s measured call,
Its warmth retreating like a tide gone low;
The heart beats faint, beneath the alabaster pall,
In rhythms only patient darkness knows.

The river speaks no more—its crystal throat
Held fast, mid-sentence, by the season’s breath;
The words it carried hover as they float
Between life’s babble and the hush of death.

A single streetlamp stains the drifted snow,
Shadows withdraw behind mute glass and stone;
Footsteps fade where never children go,
Each doorway learning how to stand alone.

Far off, a solitary crow surveys the plain,
A sovereign over kingdoms bare and stark.
Its cry—half prophecy, half human pain—
Falls like a verdict through the frozen dark.

The thinning light of day grows sharp with truth,
As though the soul froze clear enough to see
That winter is the echo left by youth,
Rehearsing how the last of days shall be.

When snow withdraws from field and river’s curve,
And every buried color starts to rise,
We watch the thaw disclose how all we would preserve
Is only fable the Earth will revise.

The Silent Consent

29 Saturday Nov 2025

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The crowd stood still as laws were quietly unmade,
Their tongues entombed in fearful, guarded throats;
While one lone soldier broke the line, disobeyed,
Their whispers drowned beneath his dying notes.

The first to fall we left out in the cold—
Their causes strange, their battles not our own;
We turned aside as wickedness took hold
And cast them to their fates, forgotten, alone.

Then others fell like roses fed to flame,
While we perfected arts of staying blind;
We bore, we said, no portion of the blame—
This tyranny would surely fade in time.

But silence is a contract signed in night,
A covenant with devils we quietly deplore,
And every chain grows merciless and tight
With every truth we chose to ignore.

The cage descends on all we did not say,
Not with our protest, but our mute consent;
For silence writes its verdict day by day,
And we become the evil we’d prevent.

What Time Ignores

28 Friday Nov 2025

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We carve our creeds in aging stone
And call them truths that shall endure—
Yet sea and season claim their own,
And nothing mortal rests secure.

I’ve learned that wisdom wears a mask
Of certainty it cannot find;
The more we know, the more we ask,
And answers leave their shadows behind.

Philosophy? A gilded frame
We build to hold the dark at bay,
To give our oldest wounds a name
And bargain reckoning away.

We grasp at permanence like fools
Who think their grip can ransom time,
While entropy unravels rules
And fractures every grand design.

The cruelest lesson years have taught:
That tightening our hold breeds loss,
That every victory hard-won, hard-fought,
Conceals within its weight a cost.

Yet in this void, I’ve come to see
One truth my failures still implore—
That love’s the only currency
We carry past what time ignores.

So write your dogma, if you must,
On brittle pages born to fade,
But know we all return to dust,
And love outlasts the oaths we made.

The Architecture of This Home

26 Wednesday Nov 2025

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Home is the bruise you carry in your heart,
The one small place you dare to be your own;
You light its dark with souls who etched their part,
The only safe haven where your secrets are known.

You build it out of vows that would not hold,
Of chairs left empty, frames without a face;
You mortar every memory against the cold,
And call that ache your last and only place.

You drag it with you every time you move,
Those same four corners, carried place to place;
You lay out all the ghosts you can’t remove,
The ones no new address can ever erase.

At times it feels a refuge from the rain,
Four phantom walls that no one else can trace;
At times it is a ledger of your pain
Where every hurt unlocks another space.

And if they ask you where you’re truly from,
You touch your chest, as if to hide the scar;
For home is where your wandering is finally done,
The place you crawl back to when you’ve strayed too far.

Banana Inc.: An American Autopsy

25 Tuesday Nov 2025

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They wheeled him to the Oval Office, tie slightly askew,
Propped up by two interns while cameras withdrew.
They wired his dead hand to a stylus with tape,
Till it scrawled over laws in a slow, palsied scrape.

The live address goes sideways when his jaw won’t move on cue,
The teleprompter scrolls right past, his pupils fixed like glue.
The networks cut to anthems, blame a “server malfunction”—
The spin room calls it treason to hint at his brain’s dysfunction.

The press corps smells the rot yet echoes each official line,
“He’s leading in new ways—a stable genius by divine design.”
The aides blame the reek on “renovations, mold behind old walls,”
While senators toast “his wisdom” in chandelier-washed halls.

His handlers staged him for speeches with cue cards reversed,
So “cease every fire” read like “strike with full force.”
Three calls for restraint turned to three global wars,
And spin doctors gushed that his “backbone held course.”

At last the truth comes out: he’d been brain-dead long past,
Yet they’d signed his whole agenda—the die had been cast.
The rich praised his “legacy,” hailed it as “unsurpassed,”
While lobbyists toasted the smoothest coup at last.

They sold the courts at auction, ran a fire sale on the press,
Insisted “banana republic” meant “streamlined governance.”
Now the world’s biggest circus struts in star‑spangled drag,
With a dead man at the podium and his logo stitched on the flag.

Dirges in Heartwood

24 Monday Nov 2025

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I found the ancient oak at twilight’s edge alone,
Its roots like gnarled fingers clutching lore unknown,
A thousand rings within its buried throne,
A testament to secrets never shown.

The bark was scarred with lovers’ carved initials,
Each ghostly trace by time grown indelible,
Like echoes fading from old rituals,
What’s left of hearts once indivisible.

I pressed my palm against its trunk and felt
The steady pulse of centuries aching deep beneath,
While all my modern certainties cracked, began to melt
Like morning frost upon a forgotten heath.

“What meaning endures in life?” I said to the tree,
Whose boughs clawed dusk’s extinguishing light,
It answered—not with verse nor elegy—
But bearing witness to the earth’s undying might.

The wind through hollow boughs exhaled a ghostly moan,
A dirge for all who’d rested in its shade—
Children’s voices lingered, their innocence long flown,
Now buried in the very ground they’d played.

It bore the burden of each desperate plea,
Lost vows entangled in its tome of rings,
As years collapsed to frailty and debris,
I felt as slight as specters, vanished from the living.

The ruined ages whisper dirges while they weep—
As its limbs held vigil over kingdoms’ ash and bone,
Guarding the dreams that mortals could not keep,
Immortal, ageless, eternally alone.

I thought of all the souls with ghosts of grief to wrestle,
Who’d asked the questions that now plagued my mind,
And found no answers in its primeval vessel,
Just solemn silence holding secrets we’ll never find.

The truth descended as the darkness grew:
That meaning wasn’t something to be found,
But carved, like names, in heartwood’s layered view—
Each life a ring that marks what fate had bound.

The oak would stand long after I had died,
My memory as faded as those names,
Yet every root would mock what men confide—
The living earth erases all our claims.

Prescribed Delusions

23 Sunday Nov 2025

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They chained me to the iron bed, yet claimed it for my good,
And smiled as though their mercy might restore what madness could.
I spoke of clear perception, of memory pure, intact—
But every white coat listening marked my reason as abstract.

One took my pulse with trembling hands, his stare too wide to blink,
He said my fragile sanity was hanging by the thinnest link.
He swore he’d seen the shadows slip beyond the ward’s cold end,
Then scrawled my fate in crimson, grinning, “I’ll ensure you mend.”

A second came scribbling on charts, his voice a solemn hymn,
He diagnosed my clarity as folly, as the wardlights flickered dim.
His badge read “Saint Perception,” with embroidered benediction,
He praised my lucid reasoning—then tripled my prescription.

A third arrived in borrowed shoes, his coat was torn and gray,
He ordered I be tranquilized for reasons he’d not say.
He muttered of conspiracies that prowled the sterile floors,
Then scrawled his prophecies and warnings on walls that all ignored.

The fourth declared, “You’re lucid, sir, but bound by unseen bars.”
He promised swift release should I reveal my hidden scars.
When I obeyed, he wept aloud, and trembled at my touch—
Then whispered, “They’ll bury me for showing you too much.”

A fifth came proud with trembling chin, his gaze both sharp and sly,
He flapped his arms as if he were a bird, and asked if I knew how to fly.
He wrote a note declaring I was free from mad extremes,
Then folded it into a fragile bird to cradle all my dreams.

A sixth physician’s laughter murmured like some dark master,
He quizzed me on the voices I remembered from my disaster.
He said he’d write an article to prove that I was sane—
Then vanished mid-conclusion, like footsteps drowned by rain.

A seventh waved a rosary and sniffed the sterile air,
Insisting that the staff were ghosts and none of them were there.
He knelt before my bedside, kissed the restraints around my knees,
And whispered, “Pray they never learn we share reality’s disease.”

And still they come—these doctors, proclaiming with their hands,
Each diagnosing madness no mortal understands.
The bleakest wisdom I’ve learned is entombed within these institutional shells:
The greatest madness lingers just outside these padded cells.