Abnormalities

Abnormalities


Draped in darkness and knocking at Death’s door,
reality leaves off and madness begins;
down twisted streets paved with human skulls
to the City of the Dead.

It is built upon the communal decay of the dearly departed,
who endlessly toil in barren gardens filled with cobwebs, memories, and whispered reminiscence,
among crouched buildings collapsed in huddles of rotting roofs and toppled steeples,
and perverse abnormalities of flesh and bone.

The city looms stark and queerly proportioned, leaning at perilous angles against a jagged and festered sky;
its blight-shadowed structures made of squalor and petrification,
spew an overwhelming smell of wet earth, worms, and death,
as sightless and silent as an unnatural stillness of night that will never end.

I saw someone come down along the road.
among the crumbling buildings and stench-cursed streets;
walking beneath the blasphemous decapitated steeple of an ancient black church
that held the twisted face of a clock with no hands.

A humped man, he was, with a gait so familiar that it pained me,
an unspeakable menace more disquieting than the dismal architecture.
I felt his hollow stare burrow into my flesh, his eyes gaping like dark windows into my past
and stealing the very warmth from my blood.

Then as he approached,
I saw it was . . . me.