Darkness calls like a lover, cold in our bed.

I’d like to answer in decaying kind.

The screams are shaking my skull but

The silhouettes say, “Carry on”.

---

The shadows meekly wax and wane.

Peripherally, I see them loitering

Lost Stygian feline, begging for the

Scraps of my sanity, soul, and saline.

---

She comes for me, the Crone in her shroud,

Like a grandmother, like a goal,

And I, mother of the arid sea-that-was, twist

To find the misleading maiden of my youth.

---

She says, “don’t quit,” but I miss it, the emptiness.

In sleep, I find the memory of not existing,

And my desiccated lust for life recedes further still.

So I answer them all in turn, “Soon, my love.”