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It's highly unlikely that I will seek publication for this poem, so I may as well post it here. This poem is very atypical of my usual efforts, having been, as is probably obvious from the title, written as a deliberate ode to the work of Georg Trakl; though with none of his felicity...

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She walked along the edge of emptiness, and asked no questions, solved no mysteries. No one ever responded to her lonely voice in the great darkness. And when she stepped off the edge, her lungs full of black dust, her heart bursting, she saw the grim radiance of a distant night

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My poem Night Bus has been published online by Horror Sleaze Trash. It can be read at the following link: Taryn Allan Horror Sleaze Trash

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The angular shape of the aborted presence did not glide across the room or hide in dark corners, pleading with the light not to touch its delicate skin. It did not plunge into madness, or to its death, or anywhere at all. It rested, cold and indifferent, in the innocuous void...

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In the street the snow has created a new labyrinth, promising to guide anyone interested (or still awake) to the end of their hell and beyond. But this white sterility delights only in the annihilation of others, and the sufferer cannot intrude anymore

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Dreaming, I approach the house at the end of the road where children had invented a game to dissolve their melancholy in laughter. But time silenced their voices and ravaged their joy, and now the house stands empty before the void. After all, happiness is just another game

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Last night your ceiling gave way to the stars, and something stole into your dreams, a nightmare lurking, alive, in the dark, stretching its ivory limbs. It spoke, a comforting murmur of death annihilating your maddening thoughts, its fingers gripping your face,

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A short one this time, published by Horror Sleaze Trash. Taryn Allan Horror Sleaze Trash

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Like others, you stagger toward a row of hospitals and funeral homes, and the sun burns a hole in your coat, lying to you about summer and so on. On your way there, you repeat

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(A short poem inspired by a heatwave; and also my 500th post here on TLO. :) ) A Red House in a Black Land Even the deepest darkness lies in decay Night’s soothing balm boils With the heat of blistering day And the moon seems wreathed with fire A searing lidless eye, long-sired

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Sometimes at rest I think I know the high and lonely cold white road where all have gone and all must go. Sometimes in sleep I think I see the thing that will become of me in the stillness of the sea. Sometimes I hear a silent singer sing in the grey evening while the...

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1 Unprepared for whatever had arrived at his house, he drifted like a boat across the white sky. Later, one of his relatives found him in the bathtub drowned in someone else’s blood.

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A yellow rooftop falls into the sky, and worlds get trapped and spin inside my skull. They dream. But what they dream about? When street lights wake and gaze upon the dark, I stretch the shadows of the worlds

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Crystalline pools of moonlight had stripped the house of its apparitions. “Hold me,” the ghost wept entering the ruptured world of nonexistence.

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four bare walls confirm my corporality, stop me from overflowing, from becoming something else, something unfeeling. I should have been a wing of a bird, parasites crawling in my feathers

Two poems inspired by Thomas Ligotti’s ”Nethescurial”

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Two poems inspired by Thomas Ligotti’s ”Nethescurial”

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Blind Corners There was frozen honey in the air that night each street led straight to the sewers every exit chained off Blind corners like echoes whittled out of death You couldn’t look anything in the eye we’re frantic at the wax museum trapped behind bulletproof mirrors

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And what is left for man but to gaze on his own countenance; To glory in himself. Is it not all his own invention at the last? He marvels endlessly at his creation, all glittering Future eternal and phantasm of the past. For tis' better to not see that darkness that lies beyond...

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... To thee who hold'st this book in rotting hands, I sing: Reader, cast down thy mask! Thou art the King! ...

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