A Watery Grave

If you missed this morning’s prompts post, I’m responding to Not in the Grave.

For today’s images I tried something new and played with fabric under water to create a ghostly under-water grave.

OctPoWriMo 2023: Facing Our Fears

NIghtmare Nocturnes

Darkness arrives earlier each day
and against my will I tire earlier each day
because then the battle begins earlier each day
hope against horrors earlier each day
and I rush toward death earlier each day

Nightmares in progress meet my heavy lids
lost child me in the forest behind my heavy lids
the wolves—fangs bared snarling—race on my heavy lids
they catch her and bite her behind those heavy lids
she doesn’t fear death, she wants to return earlier each day

Nightmares progress and hold me down; I can’t move
hold my screams in my throat while I can’t move
Cut with knives, scissors, and scalpels while I can’t move
their eyes burn blood-red while I can’t move
aichmophobia or latrophobia I move from bed earlier each day

Each nightmare ends just before death surprised to meet the dark
yet the horror lingers waiting to meet me in the dark
and each day I have an earlier meeting with the dark
To face a fear dream-made all too real, I meet the dark
a growing nyctophobia begins earlier each day

Writober 2023

Logline: A haunted piano fantasizes about its next player, its next love.

The Touch of Your Fingers

One day you will have to move. Maybe your landlord’s adult children want your apartment, or your landlord sells and your apartment is being torn down. Either way you will decide it’s time to buy your own place. You will move into a deserted old house, feeling brave about your fixer-upper. And after clearing away the cobwebs and dust, and hauling away the broken and rusted, dry-rotted and mildewed, and the completely unusable things, and after you’ve washed and cleaned and polished and fixed and painted, you will realize the piano is in pretty good shape. Surprisingly good shape. You will not have played in many years but had once imagined playing professionally, especially on those Friday nights in college when you reserved piano time in the concert hall.

You will sit down on the bench that creaks under your slight weight which will worry you slightly imagining the legs going out from under you, but then you will settle in and touch the keys that will be miraculously in tune, and you will play whatever your fingers play, improvising something that is so beautiful to your ears you can’t believe those are your fingers caressing the keyboard. That is when we will meet for the first time.

I had intended to listen to Chopin’s Nocturnes on my record player while writing my poem today, but on two Chopin albums and all my piano classics records I did not find a single nocturne, so here are all of Chopin’s nocturnes on YouTube: