POETRY BY JOHN GREY

John Grey is Australian born, USA resident, short story writer, playwright, poet and retired Financial Systems Analyst for a Fortune 500 company. Has had over 20,000 poems published in numerous magazines including Weird Tales, Space and Time, Speculative Poetry, Christian Science Monitor, Greensboro Poetry Review, Green Mountains Review, Prism International, Poetry East, Agni, Poet Lore and Journal of the American Medical Association. 

He was the winner of Rhysling Award for short genre poetry in 1999. He was the theater critic and poetry columnist for a local Providence Rhode Island weekly arts magazine and has had plays produced off-off Broadway and in Los Angeles.

His most recent books are Covert, Guest of Myself and Memory Outside The Head from cyberwit.net.

EVIL

After sundown,
a thin wedge of red sky
is all that separates
mountain range and oblivion.

Straw flame flickers one last time in the treetops.
Darkening fields run into the vanishing lake.
Bats replace birds in what’s left of sky.
Headland beasts retreat into their cave of night.

Even my goodness
can’t withstand the creep of shadow.
The light may watch over me.
But it’s the gloom that issues my instructions.

THE WOODS ARE ALIVE

The woods are one
of reality’s great fabulations,
a realm where pretend joins forces
with whisper and rustle and hiss
and soughing of tree trunks, crack of twig,
to make monsters
that are forever at that terrifying state
of almost becoming visible.

A humble hike is a matter of 
something stalking me,
a predator concocted from
shards of unexplained sound,
too many horror stories
and a dark infatuation with
the worst that can happen.

Yet I don’t turn back,
but go on deeper into the forest,
where the foliage thickens,
noises can be traced
to fewer and fewer sources,
air chills, light has to work
that much harder
to shine through the canopy.

I’m stopped in my tracks
by a loud thump.
My eyes can’t make out
what caused the sound…
I turn all evidence
over to my mind.

FEAR NIGHT

Your imagination lies between
the noise you hear
and what you fear is making it.

The later the hour,
the more solitary the place,
increases your mind’s likelihood
that something is coming for you.

A floorboard creak
can only be a footstep.
A radiator hiccup
is the stifled cry of a beast.

The wind whisper
is that same voice
that once warned you
what happens to naughty girls.

As you skin rises,
your nerves pull taut.
The night is warm
but sudden hoar frost
slows your blood.

Your hurried breath
feels like it’s stealing
from all of your breaths to come.