nightmarish

I have come to believe
All poets
must be subjected
to living with an infestation
of cockroaches.

An introduction
or deep reading of Dante
and Dracula has much to teach
about finding ones way
through the dark.

I play my hand
on the Book of Change
with my three lucky pennies;
one, because of Honest Abe,
2, because they contain copper
and lastly, mostly,
they are worth no cash value.

There is a Canto
that smolders into charcoal,
I am drawn to
the source.

The house is bigger,
emptier.
I guess the walls speak
now only in echoes 

and embers.

Some of us will make it out

alive.

Painting by Petrus van Schendel [Public domain].