In The Dark

I spend my days reading poetry,

my nights lamenting, curiously,

I still wonder why nightmares take me,

why I find beauty in spilled blood,

in a hollowed corpse, a ripened soul,

a life that once was,

a life yet to come,

in words of misery, forming teardrops,

candlelit, rivers of silver

sliding to the wrist

of the hand that holds the pen,

scrawling out verses against better will,

easy rhymes for hardened times,

pretty words to sugarcoat

the morbidity, the macabre,

estranged to sensitivity,

a way to cope with the ferocious,

I have brushed death thrice,

a grasp upon the coil,

I have fallen for an eternity,

spirals in the darkness,

colours, shapes, visions,

and then light,

blinding, intrusive, too bright,

and now I prefer the dim,

the way shadows move,

the way words flicker on the page,

dancing to a shaky heart,

still beating.