The wailing tomb

 

Here I sit

alone in this waiting room,

tomb. The clock ticks doom.

I hear the agonised screams

of another that has stared

into the void.

Madness creeps

on the edges of their cries,

for those that look deeply

into the deadlights

only see the ends of everything untie,

and the great unravelling begin.

 

I sit,

fingers drumming,

running, pounding.

 

Thudding.

 

Like the empty hole in my chest.

 

I close my eyes

and I see the emptiness

so vast

and I try to grasp

my place in it.

 

The scream pierces the air 

like nails in a coffin scraping

the lid until fingers are torn.

Chalkboard memories scraped

all around. The sound. Hurts.

 

The man that stared

into the void,

must now be clawing at his eyes,

for the things seen

in the dark night

of eternal pain

are not to be seen

by the feeble human brain.

 

I sit.

 

Feet shaking.

Knuckles white, gripping tight

to a last stand of sanity

and I realise I’m screaming.

The voice I heard

all along was my own,

and those things I was shown

were so very true.

The amorphous tock

 

The grand

cosmic time piece

sits in its place

in the palace created

by the scattering dust

of eternal echoes.

 

The gears twist,

the gentle click

of a galactic cog

joining another

in hand-holding

harmony.

They twist

together.

 

It ticks.

 

A sound echoes across the cosmos.

 

It ticks.

Not in seconds,

not hours, nor days,

not weeks, nor years.

It ticks in millennia.

It ticks once then

the sound travels so far.

 

In the silent stirs

of an empty dream,

the timekeeper sleeps,

not disturbed,

by the almost

silent sound, not alarmed

at the passing of time.

Unaware of

the ticking of a clock,

as it shifts so slickly,

it stays quiet

until you focus on its hands,

when you finally hear it

 

Tock.

 

The grand cosmic timepiece looms

in the palace formed

of unspoken alien nightmares,

in the shattered crystal

of endless screams.

The megalithic gears

twist menacingly into place.

A clunk. As the thudding

pneumatic drill of time pushes

its way through the cogs.

Grinding catastrophic resonance

echoing its crazed distorted song

into the everlong amorphous creation.

 

The timekeeper wakes

from the labyrinthine

void of sleep,

and screams.

The hungry god

 

The globulous form oozes

across cosmic storms

and nebula chasms.

It aches to find its place,

amongst the stars

and the planets.

It sees so much beauty,

and feels so lonely

 in this infinite space.

 

"The old gods they called us", he laments,

"If only they could see the misery, inherent

in the long crawl across ages,

but they speak with fear engrained

in the way their words seep

through the grains of time"

 

Like ink across a black night of empty pages,

a splash of surprise on his gelatinous eyes.

He spies a planet, blue and green,

a place bountiful and free,

a place of so many colours and

he

wants to visit,

to consume.

 

For his hunger groans

like galactic thunder 

across the vast aeons.

His rumbling hunger

rages on forever.

 

The mass slithers

through the stratosphere.

Bleakness in the atmosphere.

The brink of apocalypse,

the booming

of a total eclipse.

Faces look up in awe,

lips quiver in fear,

screaming as the tears 

flood the seas,

and their sky

disappears

 

The mass expands,

opening glands.

It must be a mouth

some people shout,

whilst others are jelly on a plate,

sloppy and unsettled,

spoon-feeding

their fear to the air.

 

The maw opens

and the ink splits

the night.

A grand arching symphony.

It speaks, "don’t be scared,

I’m here to bring the light.

I may look scary,

but my form is not my heart,

and what I hold inside is pure,

love" and in a bite

he absorbs

the hate, leaving

only hope without fear.