Lost
Carl E. Reed
A
flicker in peripheral vision
attenuated
echoing sounds
juddering
gray afterimage:
lost against
black background.
Something
malevolent, fleet-foot
silent,
lurking, wroth
fades
from foreground to shadow;
stalks,
but never accosts.
I
move through dust & cobwebs
where
splintered moonlight plays
’pon
sheet-covered trunks & furniture:
mute
relics of brighter days.
Moss’d
stone & creaking floorboards
moldering
leather-bound tomes;
a
broken-winged granite angel
averts
its face above my bones.
Come
out; come out, beloved!
Children,
servants, friends!
Something
flickers, & whirls, & torments—
forever
distracts, forfends.
Author’s note:
The
maddening, relentless, omni-present abstraction/revelation which haunts our
ghostly narrator but refuses to come into focus when stared at directly is:
“acceptance and recognition of his own death”.
Carl E. Reed is currently employed
as a roofing operations
specialist at a window, siding, and door company just outside Chicago. Former
jobs include: U.S. marine, long-haul trucker, improvisational actor, cab
driver, construction worker, and door-to-door encyclopedia salesman. His poetry
has been published in The Iconoclast, Spectral Realms, Black
Petals, & Deathlehem: Holiday Horrors; short stories in Black
Gate, newWitch, and Sci-Fi Lampoon magazines. “Dinner at
Winthrop’s: A Tale of Sufferance” was published 2020 in the weird romance
anthology Down the Rabbit Hole, vol. III. His most recent weird
fictions “Haunted House” and “Night Terror” will appear in Down the Rabbit
Hole, vol. IV: Madness. “The Candidate” will be published in
Penumbra #3. Additional short stories and poems are scheduled to be published
in 2022 and 2023 in various other venues.
