The Cracked Chalice and the Two-Backed-Beast

Cowering in the dark cell of a child-mind, brooding in a nest of gloom, one towering terror raises a nodding, hoary head like a babe of shadow, seeded as Grendel ruts with Kraken, their two- backed writhing union birthing a shapeshifting, howling hungry beast. A babe blessed by the crooning, slow-turning leviathan pondering in the deep, christened with curse-etched bones of all who restless wrest their rest full fathom five, voices drowning and blending forgotten in layering sediments of time.

Unspeakable firstborn shapeless, suckling wtih many mouths mother's milk from the writhing, white-eyed squid. A spawn that stirs, devours bats, serpents, maggots, rats and shrieking dreams; a creature born and spitting scorn at Charon; sniffing, grunting, snuffling, drooling, tracking sure the trail of telling pomegranate seed.  The newborn monster swims in steady strokes to breach the roiling moat that cleaves the breathing from and to our hellish underworld. It crawls onto the banks of sleep, shaking off a dust of dream and still is there; is here, it sniffs and lifts its face, shifting shape to fit each black and empty fearful place. Padding thick and quiet, mighty prints in sucking ooze, slouching towards our Bethlehem to stalk the waking hours just beyond the fire, to eat the light the spills from we whose chalice cracked, its prey the child least, the one who lags, flickers, and riveted looks back, trails the pack, guttering weak and pale.

When I was small, alone with Poe, Tolkien, LeGuin, and Graas, stranded on  the island of a floating canopy bed, late and shipwrecked on the eastern seaboard sweltering August , Cicadas and 17 -year locusts swarmed and throbbed to warn.  In summer pregnant heavy with threatened thunderstorm their ringing  orbit fugues of humming rippling harmony-staccato outward like armies to converge, a mesmerizing vibrating parlay permeating the dark air, beware! Irridescent armor scarabs swarming, every breathing surface crawling, sightless darkpool eyes unblinking, they are the vanguard, and the beast is nigh.

Midnight held her breath, the banshee of regret and sorrow storming over, singing the Seventh Seal, late for chess with death, her velvet cape smothering the weak and waning moon. Fireflies flung glowing armor against the window screens, metallic trilling bitter edge of scent tasted on the tongue tapping code crossways through the bated air.Threading the needle bats swift swoop, pull tight, sewing shut the terrors seeded in the fertile soul, swaddling breath of night.

Outside and beyond the shadowed Oak rustles caution hugging limbs and standing down, pinned with corsage of lunar moth, sheet lightning flashes urgent like a shell-shocked lighthouse of the underworld casting the word across the sea -  Run!  Flee! Hide or your soul will wake a changeling, the creature in the mirror becomes your captor who will  never pay your ransom, and never call your name. You could not wake, no safe purchase to be found, and in the morning buried below waking and all the long and mocking stretch of day, where some cold twin has stolen your place in the play, the echo scent of the marauder only you could hear.  You were taken you were gone,  trapped hostage like the mole's wife living underground, dragged down bound to your piano sinking fast in the green cold salt sea.  The distant  scorched and ravaged siege will again and again at night draw near, you listen, you hear the beast ever hunting, returning  and anon newborne rising from your dark cradle in the rocking deep.

 There are two of you, and two of me, cloven broken light and night, fractured born and buried stolen, we are replaced, betrayed by a greedy understudy,  drugged in waking sleep.