A poem
Moon spill glazes the massive façade,
crumbling brickwork insensate, agape,
the ravaged visage of what once purged
the fevered minds of the torn and tortured.
Teeth of glass snapped from mouldering frames,
vines like emerald steel mangling the panes.
Through that mawed smile, I glimpse within
the skull beneath rot’s gristing grin.
What squirms in those peeled eye-pockets?
What scratches at those slitted sockets?
My flesh pales, my bones shook to sag
at the form slouched along the parapet.
A stooping, twisted, hunchback wraith
glugs phlegmy snarls of watchdog hate,
its hooked claws furred with antique moss,
its crooked beak dribbling blackroot draughts.
Deep inside, the groans still moan
from hovels where the butchers boned,
iron shrieks creasing every stone
with the grease of dread, the grouse of those
on whom the doctors plied their blades,
peeling hope’s last face until it frayed.
Unleashing from the hatched abyss
a thousand Rorschach-lashed agonies.
Gonging through the halls’ empty throat
a keening, through the asylum moat
unleashing the howldown ghoul-raid
to swallow my soul with its toadstool braid!