“I walk hand-in-hand with darkness,” he began,
the man with no eyes.
“You have no idea of the horrors I have seen,
of the fears that have touched my soul,
the hurt of a love lost in a dark night.”
The children sat still.

“Death is the only guarantee in your lives;
she is the only thing to bet on and win every time.
I have seen her carry away so many lives now
I become convinced I will be visited personally next.”
The children fidgeted, uncomfortable and unsure.

“If you want happiness, **** yourselves whilst you are still children,
when you are naïve to the ways of the real world.”
A parent attempted an interjection.
The children stared, confused.

“The meaning of life is obscured by sorrow.
You are learning in the kindergarten of woe.
Insecurities run your engine.
Prejudice snuffs your fire.
By peering into the gaping maw of that tarry, endless black,
you appreciate how easy it is to
Just
Let
Go.”
A child began to sob,
more at the tone of the eyeless man’s voice
than the syllables and interpretations of those sounds.
Parents gathered around an imaginary fire,
faces facing faces facing faces
and shadows hid a smile on one.
A devil always hides in a band of angels,
“…blood-stained angels…”

The knives cut and sliced and soon
the next-generation abattoir housed but two.
A storyteller and his demons
laughing at the wolf moon,
young bones breaking under foot.
Wine glasses full of young blood
and shards of everlasting death.
The man with no eyes embraces his demons
and slips silently into the paralysing void,
his laugh spilling into the still of the night.