This poem only available on Stories Space. If you are reading it elsewhere, it has been stolen.

Darkness and shadows suffuse my being,
With a lamplight of mellow to keep me in the corner.
What treads up the stairs behind me, dear?
A creak on the banister,
A gibbering snicker of monstrous drooling,
An icy breath from the maw of the long-dead,
A touch of skittering fingers that
Giggle and crawl across the
Bare skin of my neck.
And here I sit
In my lamplight of hours,
Passing my time in a hazy midnight of musty velvet.

Break the back of arrogance
On the high seas of the departed.
Elegance and temerity are haughty in this thick air
As I wait for something
And expect nothing
And shift a little in my chair.

Echoes of visitors from the past
Ride the air with skeletal intentions,
Wafting their sulphuric shadows that limp their way
In circles around morbid columns of damp plaster.
Dust and fusty fortitude,
Too limp to roil,
Too worn to roll,
Sniff their clammy noses in the darkness
Past this puddle of confused volition.

Phantasmal dreams weave silver threads
Across my fingers as I try
To pluck them away with numbed fingers.
Spectral graces grow mould on ancient bread
And drink the sour wine of their own being.
No bed of sunshine have I here,
In my hallway corner whilst
They creep up the stairs.

Razor teeth and the stench of rotting
Unfurl tendrils through the spindles
Just behind me,
And I cannot leap from my chair
To wrench the curtains aside from the window
And let the sunlight in.

Here I sit,
In echoes.
Sing I to the midnight,
And I to the spectres;
Sing I to the harvest of dirges.
Sing I to the lost,
And the fallen and weary,
Sing I to the soulless decayed.

For my chair,
In this puddle of mellowed dust,
Is the only solidity I can find.
And I shall hum to myself,
On my hallway chair,
Until the
Thing on the
Stairs
Sings back.

This poem only available on Stories Space. If you are reading it elsewhere, it has been stolen.