Poem - Nightmare Macabre

I've been sitting on the majority of this one for a while, with plans to polish it up and post it on Halloween. I could go into details about the best-laid plans and all that, but suffice to say it simply got away from me. Running with a three-year-old and trying to get in at least one traditional Halloween movie made sure that I was late, as usual!

This one was a great exercise for me, as I truly enjoy letting the Poe side out. I also completed this work in iambic pentameter, to mimic the beating of a frightened human heart. To read it appropriately, each line should come faster than the last. (For an understanding of iambic pentameter, check here)

Terror awakens a different dimension of the human mind, and I always feel more alive after allowing those creative juices to flow. Enjoy!

Nightmare Macabre

Awake in the night, sleep usurped by fear

A short ride is needed, myself I tell

Cannot shake realism, nightmare’s cold grasp

Buried alive in an eternal hell

Feeling so foolish, held awake by fear

Yet a feeling that cannot be pushed back

Is that a leering face in the corner

Awaiting my approach for an attack?

“A drive it will be,” I say to myself

In the vain hope that this feeling might pass

Yet that fathomless terror comes back now

When the monster looks back through smoky glass

I exit home, make my way to the truck

Am I caught in some nefarious game?

Candle burns in the house across the road

Home abandoned, yet light burns all the same

I pull from the drive and start down the road

Not sure where to go, but sure that I should

Bloodied teddy is gripped in the hands of

A little girl who stands alone at the woods

She smiles and waves as I drive by her tree

Rotting flesh is flaking from her cold hand

I press the gas as my heart starts to pound

Is it madness that has taken this land?

A light rain falls as my journey begins

High overhead, the moon rots from the sky

Birds fly backward as they return to nest

Where fell offspring feed on men as they die

The steady drizzle becomes a downpour

Then the downpour becomes terrible flood

Windshield is spattered with warm viscera

As the rain from the dark sky turns to blood

As I drive I’m haunted by dark whispers

And tales that men are nothing more than meat

I’m told these grim truths by a bloody fiend

A demon who sits in passenger seat

I turn back to home, for night is too dark

And the nightmares are escape from new real

The world has become too gruesome and grim

And the moon rises once more over hill

As night resets I return to my bed

There I will hide from the phantoms that stalk

Then the shadows detach from their objects

And to my fear-wracked form they start to walk

A fathomless terror besets me then

And the feeling becomes thicker than air

I hear a terrified voice, screaming, near

When I turn then to look, no one is there

I’m left with little sanity to tell

From the dreams dreamed, and the horrors I sight

And the dark shadow creatures come closer

As the thirteenth chime sounds at black midnight

And now as their prey I’m left to wonder

Considering dark places that I’ve flown

Can I ever return to sanity

After the depths of madness that I’ve known?
“This is still just a dream!” some voice tells me

But I realize as the shadow-things creep

That the dream my mind formed was a falsehood

And my tortured self was never asleep.

Randall Madden

November 4, 2014