There is a haunted house where something innocuous, like a painting or a shoe, is moved every day. And there is the sound of a dripping tap. Drip. Drip. But every time you go to look, the drip is gone, but as soon as you turn your back, Drip Drip it goes.
When the night comes to pass and you’re lying in your bed, the washing machine is spinning and spinning like all the thoughts in your head. And it spins and spins, and the swill in your head rinses the same old lines all over again.
And your skull is beside itself with its smug grin, laughing in your sleep; that’s why you grind your teeth.
And when you go outside, you see that your skeleton is wearing someone else’s fucking skin! And the man laughs, he laughs like your skull in your sleep, and you want to grab hold of that fucker and bleed your wrath all over him!
haunted
The Tree Houses
From a distance, it looked like a forest but upon closer inspection, you came to rows and rows of houses that became known as the tree houses not because they were the old traditional treehouses of old, but for their mimicry with their green pointed roofs.
Some people claimed the place is beautiful but I have to politely disagree. Though politeness may get me nowhere when the truth was so ugly.
Perhaps I should have pushed harder, derailed them from their illusions of utopia.
The roofs were plastic green and not a bird was in sight, the water that surrounded these damnable houses did not contain fish. There was no wildlife to be seen, and the doors of the house opened up like the mouths of monsters consuming all tenants who moved into them.
Many a house was haunted, not with the imagined ghosts but with the debris of collected psyches. The human form of the tenants may have left the houses but they were never the same, the houses had consumed them from within. The houses were tyrants and no one left them upon their own whim, they could only leave when the houses spat them out.
In one such house, an empty chair rocked, animated by a previous tenants anxieties.
Pictures hung in jaunty angles on the walls and the eyes of previous paranoid tenants peered through from behind the frame, though those men had left, their eyes never would.
The stairs creaked as you stumbled up them, or so it seemed. But that creaking sound was not the faux wooden floorboards, it was the sound of a madman. His essence, his humanity had been absorbed into the walls and his many cries and voices spoke for the house.
291 words in 6 minutes
Chills to the bones
Empty promises ricochet
Between the stone walls
The sound of squeaking shoes
On polished floors
Haunting this place
Full of laughter and evil
Paint on the walls
Dripping with humiliation
Seeped through all the years
A stain on hearts and minds
A reminder that life
Chills to the bones
A street
The ice cream truck plays it’s happily haunted tune as it passes, and when the dust has settled from its disturbance the street exhales a solemn sigh.
Haunting me
I’m frozen
In the presence of your absence
I stand here
In silence
And in
That silence
I don’t
Find peace
Just sadness
In abundance
Wanting
You
My lips
Needing
You
My heart
The silence
A whisper
The atmosphere
You linger
Like a ghost
Haunting
Me
2014 (c)
silverbackgorillapoetry.com 