PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

Do not draw near to that tree, alone in the distance, at the

edge of the desolated soil where nothing else grows or thrives.

Though this incessant mist obscures so much of what we ought to

see, you can choose to peer (but not too often, do not choose to

peer at it very often) at it:  the thick trunk, firmly rooted at 

this place our deceased elders deemed---and fervently believed---to

mark, and to be, the edge of the known world (beyond which were

unnamed and mostly unspoken horrors even worse than those that,

here, haunt our waking and ravage our sleeping).  Look (but not very

closely, do not strive to look very closely) and you will notice, as

I once did, gnarled limbs that reach up to the cloudclotted sky as

if to pull it down and wrench it open to release the deathly void

that only the sky can hold back from us).  And those limbs are

surmounted by branchlets that resemble twisted, and ever twisting,

fingers.  From two of those verticalized limbs and their branchlets

two victims (true believers in the purity our clan demands), who

dangle, as if from noosed ropes, and their dangling is fiercely

punctuated by the wild and violent jerking of the victims' legs, in

the tormented and agonizing manner of improperly hung persons.  In

the silence, you, too, will imagine you hear the low and chillingly

menacing voice, as I did, and its words, as I heard them, "You, too,

will find your way here and, upon arriving, will be next, like these

two, to amuse me."  But I will never find that path, no matter how

much the memory assails my mind---having gouged my eyes from these

now empty sockets that disgust you as they have disgusted others of

our kith and kin.

J-Called