Lamps burn oil well past well-known midnight as a feather pen mines a pot,
so can resume scrawling loops on parchment til brilliant, potent, and fraught.
Wild beauty of bogs and oakwoods lie out my window in late autumn’s crisp;
beckons neath tors with the twinkling aura of waiting love’s will o’ the wisp.
And yestereve’s me wouldn’t know the reflected reflective face, 
of the still mortal vessel moving through time, far more so than space. 
For she would have hastened to the light, no swamp too reedy or deep, 
would drown to try grasp what she’d ere long waited, and waded, to keep.
I know, for she did, so stay in stale air, lie I’m warm alone by a crackling fire,
from granite, drying a heart and soles only just revived from a fathomless mire. 
And ink waters the seeds of sorrow, the sought catharsis for the iron weight, 
of the nothingness left in the aftermath of a last-cackling tempted fate. 
A breakdown might free the warrior spirit locked in my mind’s haunted attic- 
a pacing prisoner at the mercy of an impassive anti-heroine felled fast static. 
This key, the hardest forged, and I don’t always remember that I’d choose to,
as I sip, mindless, another memory, a wizened hag’s steeped bittersweet brew. 

I crumple paper with one-liners or half-formed ideas lost before half-written,
frantic, as if my salvation rests on fitting one last Roman pearl of half-wit in. 
Weary winds rattle the timber frame of my den with a decrypted declination,
“no couplet crafted, no matter if crafty, can we deliver in justice or absolution.”
Breaking with dawn, ghosts of evoked writers passed gather now in droves,
here, gazing as aghast at my callow rhymes as at my today’s indecent clothes.
The scowls of the mob scream the reproof their mouths can’t quite speak,
and as I read them, all too well, missed scarlet creeps clear onto my cheek,

“Look beyond your panes, that’s not the moors. That’s too not a quill in your hand.
And just how many times can you erode limestone to sand?
Leave our names off your pages; leave our timeless dated words in the past;
we can’t consent, if our answers can’t be heard when we’re asked.
Heartbreaks are trite, just shy of everyone knows or will know one,
so if every line needs be a bullet and every poem, a gatling gun,
aim yet higher and deeper; deliver them with edifying tenets to the masses.
Oh, and stop feigning you need those brass wire-rimmed glasses.
Yet better, explore more musings and muses- who will and won’t share your bed,
undepleted silver and goldmines await, if you leave it, and your unmade head.”

Now the room comes again empty, and I question if it always has been-
were the luminary phantoms conjured by paranoia or pirating pen?
For mean masters of the craft, they minced no words to impart meanings, 
so I conclude they manifested of my captive shade’s restless schemings.
Just a trickster’s churlish ploy to ensure points could not be unheard or mistaken,
but I confess the truth of the ghoulish exchange left me still rather shaken. 
As an old crow (or is it a raven?) alits on my sill, I see true all fore and behind him;
the rolling green is gone; no broken cobbled roads lay paved to catered whim.
My light glares steady and harsh, it doesn’t flicker a cozy feel from a wick;
quaint flint walls are now plaster; flames, electric, lit and doused with a flick.
In frame, no ponies graze by ancient ash; no knots of hazel or alder peer in,
only an inquisitive neighbor, astir, a stone’s throw away in a formica kitchen. 
Wondering if I would endlessly sleep under, and away, the cover of sunshine, 
and if the empty glasses scattered in sight had tipped more water or wine…
Her interest moves on, and as I recognize a lover’s reverie in her moony hum, 
tears finally fall, yet not for what I had and lost; for what I let it let me become.

I lower my screen, not for the first or the last, but for the first in a long time, 
scrape dirt from my heels, slip into them to launch a daunting return climb.
Meters tally to miles, and though the lead are ever the heaviest steps to lift,
to not is to dwell eternal in this unsound and shallow, dark graveyard shift,
to exact two for each coin it pays, and working past scorn, I emptied my purse,
as arsenic prose I can’t drip into due diverted eyes thus festered til my curse.
So now a brightening sky pains a vampiric pair seeking new corners to learn,
as I venture out into a bound homeland and era, so far indifferent to my return.
Auric beacons glitter yet in steelier concrete views, still, I chart my own way;
I may ever be fool, but know to save my chance’s errand for a fresher mist day.
For now, novel tales can be plotted in unperilous, else than gothic erotic genres,
so will fill any verses not with the exotic, but with naught but single intendres.