Sometimes, you find yourself standing on the battlements,
bows drawn, arrow ready, waiting for the enemy to appear.
You can sense the presence, hidden within the fog of war
that creeps its way, serpentine, across the battlefield,
but you wait and you wait and no monster comes forth,
no harbinger of death and evil assaults your position.
The enemy, your greatest foe, is inside you.
The fog of war is a smokescreen, a green screen,
that can allow you to project anything at all.
The realisation that the monsters aren’t out there,
that your greatest foe is actually in here,
that’s true fear,
that’s true horror.

All that is lost will be returned
on white waters a storm has churned.
Carried away on a river of hope,
finding comfort at the end of a rope.

Blinded by the sudden rush of decibels hanging on expletives,
lost in a labyrinth of your own making, your own Minos, your own Minotaur,
and where is your Pasiphaë? With Prometheus on the rocks?
She cries out your name but you only hear the shredded echo,
a solitary syllable full of emotion but the meaning is gone,
carried away on another zephyr, entering the useless canal of a deaf ear.
Unsung heroes climbing mountains to find the source of a myth.
Erstwhile, your devils dance in your heart, beating their own tattoo,
leaving bruises and clots where those things should never call home,
and the realisation that they are too severe to ever be repaired,
that’s true fear,
that’s true horror.

An echo reverberates across every land
                                                    And?
Searching for your heart in the clutches of Calypso
               So?