Summer’s last cry bleeds into the placid air,

Its sober resolve of coming repose

Leaving chilling fibers of frigid gust about its roamings

A cloud cast sky rolls over the clearing above,

Steals but a glance about the cote,

Sudden rain mourns the cold heart in its damp center

A lonely glossy drop falls down the window,

Purged from its wet pooled slumber,

Slides down the dusty pane into the moldy sill below

Black whispers crawl out beyond the frame,

Drawing out long, cold webs of silk

Extending tracing nets around and along the corners

Rotten must permeates from each dark crack

Summoning memories of the losses

Deserted within the abysmal gorge of nature’s process

The black dyed timbers converging roughly

Stand above ground by shear will

Of the great secrets held within the icy wooden tomb

The door, long ago decomposed into the frame,

Now hardly allows the slightest stir;

Putrid fungal mass set guarding the gates of purgatory

The dirty, slanted step up to the door greeting

Before attempted entrance into hell,

The knob, protruding violently from the rot, spills out

Blackness exhales from the blind bowels within,

Accompanying whistle spurts forth,

Breath of things dying penetrates hope in light outside

Retched muck meets the hand driven in the hole,

A final attempt extricates the heap,

Now fragmented, the door’s absence releases the beast

II.

The grim midst of silence steals mortal vision,

Rendering the invader wholly blind,

The eyes purged from their sockets in wisps of ebon

Desperate hands searching for something to grasp

Longing even for the wintry cold,

The knife’s caress, a drop of acid, lick of a sharp flame

Eternal night grips as amber, the doomed insect,

Entombing the soul in velvet black

Dead ice of empty dankness, colder than Pluto’s core

Still dusk within solemn sarcophagus of winter,

Sucking even the light from outside

The shattered door replaced with the rapacious abyss

A last surge of half-snuffed energy reveals a snag

The body plummets to cold planking

Hands frenetically flying about in final raid for escape

The latch’s door catch struck the finger on the tip

Frigid wet bleeding in sharp crevices,

About the trap door so juxtaposed within frozen floor

Shaken scent from depths of the passage released,

Up through broken crease of lost gate

Death shudders from below through the pried open door

Decrepit ladder descending into the bowels of hell

The black earth crumbling away, aft

Tracing splintered, pegged, wooden shaft into darkness

Unleveled dirt landing in absolute still blackness

Greets cold feet with surprising glow

Warm currents circulating about the vacant cavern ahead

Mystic warmth guiding into the desolate obscurity

Shuffling dirt path into lost eternity

Felt welcoming, dry bones for companions in the dark

III.

Lost hope inside channels leading to forever

Lost memory locked in dark abandoned chamber

Lost soul in quiescent abyssal cataplexy

Lost words in the stolen breath of depravity