welcome to the horror show
where webs from spiders
stream and flow,
where witches fly upon their brooms,
offering poisoned apple brew
where monsters play
where shadows dance
where screams are songs of violence
masks go up, horns and crowns
running running, away, around
sew your ears and pluck your eyes
this is the only way to stop your own demise

Don't move or make no noise.
They react to the sound.
This place was once a shopping mall,
now there's bodies all around.

Such dread!
they're searching with soulless eyes,
From sun up,until sundown!

Their broken wailing, unearthly cry.
"THE END IS NIGH!"
My picket sign once read.
I'm forced to lie here and play dead.
They search for the living-with no rest-
I'm alive because of putrid, rotting, flesh.

I dare not make a move.
in this food court.
this unholy mess.
I lie underneath defiled remains,
insides ripped out from their chest.
I dwell within these monster's nest.
Subsist beneath decaying stench of death.
It covers my scent well:
The undead react harshly
to how the living smell.

This new world-I can't tell,
Is this hell, or a fiendish fresh start?
Are they really so different?
I can't tell either world apart.
fear has always been a substance
Pumping through my old heart.
In those days I was ignored or-
they would notice,then shudder.
While folks that lived-well,
well: they ate one another.

I'd fall asleep by night.
under street lamps shivering, uncovered.
Lived my life as a ghost.
haunted those who walked by:
My picketsign.
My shaking fist.
"THE END IS NIGH!!!"
I was cast aside;I did not exist.
they refused to see me,
Notice me when i speak.
The world was a table
With no room for my seat.

Outside corner stores I'd sit with resentment.

I needed to be noticed.
Yet my efforts never got me closer
To being seen by any ONE of them:
An exquisite type of torture.

I see now so ironic, what i used to beg for:

Maybe zombies are ghosts...
that refuse to be ignored?

Maybe if that man in the store window
-he was standing next to a mannequin-
If he hadn't lost his balance...
I could've began again ...?
But that false life fell.
Futility in his attempt to flee:
They ripped out his throat
before he could even yell.
In the commotion a man with a minor creeps,
Crawling toward the exit,
for a stealthy retreat.
Oh yes! I do see it too.
There's a car parked outside,
its engine running right there in the street.

Six hundred and sixty feet.
Salvation has four wheels, power steering
and leather seats.
Something is shouting in my stomach.
Their opportunity.
Their window is closing to leave with no trace
Seconds stretch as I stand
I connect - making eyes with the man.
Him and the child hesitate.
out in the open, words aren't said,
but I can see his face deliberate.
Too late: they can't turn back.
How to sneak past that last zombie
without a face to face?
It shambles in the path of their escape.
They hide under a counter:

I think its better if that child left here safe.

See.
there is bodies, all around.
Bodies all around.
Bodies.  All.   Around.

Those dead bodies kept me a secret.
Kept me safe and sound.
It's my turn to be that for you.
I nod at the man.
Can you see me?
Witness.
Witness,what I'm about to do.

A rush.
Air fills my lungs.
All fear dissipates.
The four words I yell make the zombies irate.
  
                          " THE!!!

                             END!

                              IS.

                          NIGH!!!!!!!"

**** cretins are closing in;
My two friends sneak deftly by.

I see the man and child look back.
I pick up a baseball bat.
Safely on the street
they both wave goodbye.

                  The end is nigh.

Please notice me.

-

I can see cut throats  
writing with double edged swords
horror movies

~
if you're feeling sinister tonight, come inside the darkroom. picture yourself pouring over mental images of a demure young botanist, loitering around the trapdoor of nostalgia, kissing someone new for the first time.

now imagine she is conscious and clustered in titillating blur, her smile beachy and airborne, with only the slightest suggestion that something troublesome is lurking underneath.

can you see her double exposure? totally tranquil, she poses with an arsenal of poisonous plants, as if she’s already slipped their venom into your tea.
~

The Wyg burns the separate strands above a wooden pyre. The Wyg ushers in The Line.

Mixing new colours with a robotnik slave-hand, the Wyg manipulates The Line as no other in existence has done before or since, except for Exalted Steve Ditko, he who studied with Exalted Paul Rubens.

The Wyg pays credence to the commeroration of Mars, watching over its distant skies and hallowed sand dunes, which burn as only fires can; but those of us with eyes where eyes ought to be can only see the embers that scatter across the land, settling as the hallowed, red Mars-dust.

In communication with the Mars Moth-Man, on the nights where Earth-glow streaks across exalted Azuul, the Wyg scrapes Mars Moth-Man's moth wings for the powder of the scales and uses the powder for hallowed rites of manifestation. Only in the temples of Azuul can one conjure The Line, and many materials are required.

How horrible and happy life is all together
How privileged you are to remember both together
A little bit of patience, barely spanning a meter
To sustain a tiny candle light in the heart of winter
Be still little heart
The summer is almost here
Then the reaping will start
Just as the dew reappears...

my imagination
suffers from excess
yesterday in a dream
I said that I sleep
I ordered personalized matchboxes
I saw the sea
in a plate from soup
I heard how a baton
conducts the conductor
I saw a breast
****** by a child
I uncovered a naked surgeon
on my operating table
and I recognized the voice of ******
among those gassed in auschwitz

by Volker W. Degener translated from the German by Adam A. Zych with Andrzej  Diniejko
from The Auschwitz Poems an anthology edited by Adam A. Zych

Winter had arrived
overnight, and

we had slept soundly through it, the
snow smothering

any sounds that dared
try to escape.

The morning arrived clear and sunny
and cold.

I was washing the dishes in that
old kitchen sink of ours when I noticed them—

footprints through the snow in our backyard—I couldn’t
say how many sets there were—

starting at the back fence and
proceeding directly

to our kitchen window. You
told me that you were going to head outside

to shovel the walk, but I told you
that I would take care of it, and I put on

my boots but no jacket, and I walked
out the back door, shovel held tightly

in hand. The tracks traced
the full perimeter of our house—

they appeared to be searching
for something—and they stopped

right outside of her
bedroom window—I couldn’t say

how many sets there were, or how long
they’d stood there while she slept.

I don’t know what
compelled me, but I turned the shovel

over, hurriedly using its edge to scrape
away the footprints there beneath the

window, the grass beneath them still
green and struggling to breathe.

And when I came back inside
you asked me

what I was up to out there, and I told you
that it was too cold

to shovel, that we should put on
another *** of coffee,

that we should stay inside
and not face the day,

and let the children
keep sleeping.

Roses are red
Violet are blue
The more you think of it
The more it haunts you