Three in the Morning

Two poems, one flash fiction

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

Haunted Road

Teasing a way through the dark
Inveterate, haunted track
You glow in supple moonlight
While shuddery dusk nips at my back

In need of guidance
I walk your gilded way
Hard of sight and of hearing
But faith I mustn’t mislay

I can afford no such absence
In my search for thy name
So haunted road I follow
Till comes the end of my lane

---

For Night Owls

The brain at day’s end is a wash
And that’s perfect for creativity’s sake

Edits, thoughts, doubts
All tricks of the mind
Traps if deployed too soon

The muse runs free
Or generally not at all
So don’t get in her way
Nor in yours

Twilight hours are guidelight hours
When the nightly mystique holds her greatest sway
Perchance, perchance, at the same time you’re awake

Write well, and quickly
Round the clock the muse doesn’t like to be kept
But she’ll keep you going
The more you keep going
Till edits and thoughts you’re ready for next

---

The Children

The air was cold, desolate, dry. The girl’s siblings lay down the block, one each side of the street. I had walked by the corpses earlier, inspecting what I would have to clean by nightfall. Another girl, much younger, had succumbed to the pain that morning, sucking her thumb even in death, her teeth sunk into the skin. The other, male, had crawled along the roadside a quarter-mile or so, born without a lower half. Black trailed after him until the concrete had scraped him raw enough for the rest to spill out.

This was how the children usually appeared. The earliest had arrived invariably defective, missing organs, limbs, bone structures. One of the first, headless, had been mistaken for a murder in the wordless hours before dawn. Each child had luminous, dripping appendages similar to those of the sister I'd just documented, mutations useless and surreal. Bony masks replacing different sections of the face, hearts palsied outside the ribcage, spines bursting through skin. An eye below the jawline, or many populating the lower back. Each structure was made of, coated in, the same dripping substance. The case with the jawline eye had cried this extraordinary liquid before dying in front of me, leaving me to briefly wonder if the substance was godly.

Things like these made you wish God was real.