now those eidolic dread horses have scarred your slumber, passed 9, passed 10, and even your furniture has silent, open mouthed, nightmares over the too soon dead, dead school friends who never ended their crossings, and see, see, she stoops, in shroud ghastly knelt as in prayer, but you can’t see, see through the tricks of light that scream “she is there”, your crumpling chest boiling as the bones in your legs subside while those, without body, cross the empty room, no need to surmise that which lies bereft and restless may yet have something to say and you, you are the luckless soul who lives upon their byway and now, now the voices, the voices start, those grody sounds, that won’t stop, stop your heart, beneath the floor, within the walls, the precedent for dull footfalls calling, calling to us one by one with no clear sight of saint or villain, a spectral round of hide and seek, directed by a floorboards creak, each time we search there’s nothing, nothing there, but of this guest we’re so aware, who was first, it or us, we can’t be sure, sure it wasn’t brought from distant shores, for it never raised its head or voice before, before that gift from land of Vlad was carried over our threshold and ushered in something, something cold, the bearer of an ancient fear, something as of yet unclear, or are we in thrall of phantoms more explainable
This is a combination and refinement of what were two separate poems, previously published, to make by far a more satisfying whole. I believe it more convincingly captures some of the fear and panic I was trying to convey and should be read in a breathless manner as if you were living in a world that was entirely scripted by Samuel Beckett
Taken from my 2014 collection "From A to Believe"
http://www.lulu.com/shop/paul-sands/from-a-to-believe/paperback/product-21727929.html