It's only midnight

but feels like the wee hours

of a long, draggy, lonely night

with nobody to talk to.

Sometimes solitude

is just being alone.

Sometimes it is

plain lonely.


E. Auger

the night before
the moon grew bold

I felt the darkness
move in from above
in ominous grey
opaque

it reached for me
half asleep, I
acquiesced

relinquished
pillowy clutch
splayed sheets
like legs

for his
chatter bones to chill
where my sallow
is tissue thin

his hail knuckles
affixed to wet tongue
drug me to the floor
raking my hollows
over and over

reeling terrors
on sepia filmstrip
some scenes repeating
some to-fro rewound forward
some hovered gory ending:

frigid tools cutting
to expose my insides
stirring entrail with bone
tugging ruddy strings
to see what sounds
they made as I
buckled; choked
on my leaks

I closed my eyes
tried to escape body
but he projected on
my shuttered
darting

knotting esophagus
around the backbone
fingerpainting my end
on worn flesh walls
in char-red spectrum
choreographed in
perfect harmony
with rote fear
chanting

this is how
you die -

alone

I felt it all
happening.

dangling my happy
memoirs with nooses
ungraceful reanimating
decayed draggy dancing
Xs where bright eyes
were once upon
and wide

open

every ache and
smothered secret
chirped by dark faeries
too quick to swat

but when all
the pushed down
were given mallets
they crescendoed
into discordant jarring
and in its peak came
a piercing shriek:

so loud -

all stilled
to look around

I couldn’t tell
if the voice
was him
or me

but after terror climaxed
the hear ripped and
grip released

I allowed myself
to loosen, breathe
headthrob slowly
melded into felt
beats:

limbs and tips
all pulsing
relief

and I
could see
no one was there

but me.

wielding expertly
book in my own hand
thick with tested maps

to exquisitely torture
every tenuous strand
in my fragility

kyphosis/hunchback--basket of abandon, made

stronger than a dozen shadows of men.

mustachio bushel eyebrow covering his left eye,

a bloaty flap of toad-warts covering his

right eye.

palsied arms clamped at his sides--like a chick's

wings embossed in yolk, draggy right foot trailing him.

Quasimodo: 'half made'--to swing from thickly fibrous

ropes & land on musty planks.

swinging/sliding/climbing, up & down, man to creature--

creature to man...in the attic of housed worship.

made deaf by the struck-unstruck sounds of Notre Dame's

bells, cathedral that gave him ears to hear.

of which he named each, each a heroine of the belltower.

made King of Fools by the townspeople during festivity--

crowned & propped up on a third-hand thrown.

stealing away a crowd throwing currency in a gypsy

goddess' tambourine: Esmerelda, whose proceeds went

to the: King of Thieves.

not long after Quasimodo/Hunchback is accosted with

rotted vegetables by the townspeople as he's led to the

public square.

after blindly following orders to abduct a certain gypsy

by the archdeacon.

where he's bound to a rotating pillory & flogged thirty times.

Esmeralda mounts the pillory and pours water from a leathery

flask into his mouth, as he called for it crooked-faced, the jutting

topples of sparse--but hard in the yellow of teeth.

amid bloodlust catcalls that already drenched the pasture-green

rags of his shirt.

his surrogate Father, archdeacon: Claude Frollo, the one that

first reached into a basket to coddle abandonment--as to invest

in afterworld treasures...rebreaks the bones of fifteenth century

sacrilege into covetous place.

whose unanesthetized voices escape from the mouths of Quasimodo

& Esmeralda.

whom the Hunchback rescued from the gallows, citing sanctuary

by church decree, after being falsely accused of murdering

Captain Phoebus.

a philandering standby of integrity, that saw Esmeralda's

eyes follow & fall for the span of his sword, all the wooded

babes of her marital hopes--dashed.

followed up by the sped blackening of the archdeacon's

hooded robe, ripping open the door of jealousy he spied thru.

an almost unbroken motion of forced entry, & ****** of blade

into Captain Phoebus' back--though the ***** survived the *****.

this active underbelly could withhold no more the fat of

a pig on a spit, so after several **** attempts on Esmeralda--

the "bewitched" archdeacon: Claude Frollo, was impaled by

a nail like a renounced garment by Quasimodo, and left to moths.

he loved Esmeralda as he hid his face from her in their brief

interchanges, with the rests of a pianist absorbing unplayable keys.

along with the gargoyle that spat fire from the belltower to ensure

her escape into the arms of her true love: Piere, a poet.

along the underground torches of safe passage, Esmeralda &

Piere, followed Quasimodo's secret instruction...as they were seen

to sunset.

as the king's army closed in on: The Hunchback of Notre Dame, he

clung to his stony confidant--a gargoyle.

where the pale stories of dawn climbed the cathedral, Quasimodo

clung to the gargoyle's head, where he was talked way down.

there's a lycanthrope

with broken silver cords

attached to it.

leaping over a dropped jaw--

that has eaten out of draggy

dream sequences.

wearing the moon's doppelganger,

as noise canceling headphones.

to hear a packed howl, whose

lead is followed.