You say confidence is what completes a woman
But I am no woman
Or did you forget?

Confidence is not my friend
Confidence and I haven’t spoken
In many days, and many nights
It’s pointless for her to help me
Because I am no woman

I am the moon
I am the most confusing
Reverse cryptid
You’ll never get
To figure out

I hide myself among curtains of darkness
I call them my friends
The stars protect me and let me see
I call them my brothers
The sun reflects it’s light on me and calls me beautiful
I call him my lover

Isn’t it funny
How I only let you see
What I choose to show you
I will let you see me at my fullest, but only for a night
I won’t let you see me at all
And each day I reveal and conceal, whenever I choose

And even then i am a mystery
Because a valuable piece
To this complex puzzle
Is missing
Because just like every woman
Don’t I have a dark side?
- C.M. 9/3/17

Between the din of dusk and dawn
Runs Sleepy Pillow Lane,
Where gators guard the Gates of Thorn
And cryptid creatures reign.

They glide across the midnight sky
Like grime in sanguine sewers;
White canines long and talons drawn
Spike rodents on a skewer.

Gray giants glare from full-moon eyes,
A ghastly ghoulish spell;
Sweet sleepers swell the wells of Nile
While centaurs swing the bell.

Horned vipers writhe into your fears
Like scythes through strangled weeds;
And severed heads of angel hair
From shouldered stumps relieved.

A putrid pile of newly-deads
Awaits the devil's scorn;
And legless maggots gorge in beds
From which the fly is born.

Hungry hyenas howl in packs
While circling carrions crow;
And chunks of flesh are torn from backs
Cracking bones bare below.

Scavengers feast on man and beast,
No rotting limb is spared;
From hanging tongues to napping feet
Blood splatters everywhere.

Brimstone and thunder fill the air
With hail presaging doom;
Ten toothless witches shriek and cheer
As zombies creep from tombs.

Masked mummies stalk with stakes and stones
In search of sleeping heads;
They crave the skulls and living bones
Of bodies slumped in bed.

Through R.E.M. you toss and turn
And roll on restless wheels;
Alas Red Rooster blows his horn
To end your grim ordeal....

~ P
(January, 2013)

The reflection in the mirror
returns me a sad and forced smile,
the dried-up hair barely catching the light,
and those brown eyes sinking like holes in the ground.

Who could love that face?
With its rough features,
its coarse skin and bent nose.
A pyrrhic beard and that weak chin.

And what about those arms, huh?
Long and thin like church candles,
but with no flare.

Not much of a chest either,
there are gravestones with more bulk,
and people are far happier to see them too.

But above all it’s the barrenness that scares me,
the sinkholes run deep and the candles cold,
and the gravestones go down to the foundations of the world.

The reflection in the mirror returns me.
Nothing