POETRY BY MAXWELL I. GOLD
Maxwell I. Gold is a Rhysling and Pushcart award nominated prose poet who writes weird and cosmic horror. He is a regular contributor to Spectral Realms, and his work has also appeared in Weirdbook Magazine, Space and Time Magazine, Startling Stories, Strange Horizons and many other magazines and anthologies.
Maxwell’s prose poetry collection Oblivion in Flux: A Collection of Cyber Prose was released from Crystal Lake Publishing last year.
THE NAIGOTH WAITS
When leathery wings flapped across graveyards of sword and sin,
whispers from shadow-past and curse, gripped my soul.
Ne’er dragon claws, or chimeric songs were so dreadful as the music of ancient wings;
whose great expanse covered all sight and darkened every earthly corner.
Gusty winds through the sandy night, revealed my darkest truths
as I saw the naked graveyards of sword and sin
when awful wings flapped in tenebrific skies.
WHERE NO ONE GOES
Chthonic palaces and decayed ruins fell past the Lady Hourglass, whose sands littered vast fantastic dreamscapes, lands once conquered by gods and beasts, she dwelled in a world forgotten to legend, and to me. It was a place where no one goes, buried under half scribbled parchments, inked in blood, and illuminated under the waning candlelight inside a rusty dungeon. The Castle of Näigöths stood, a house wrought with death and curses, her haughty, labyrinthian estate; I told myself I’d never go there again butfound myself drawn to the strange beauty which painted its marble, jade, and ivory walls.
Towers constructed in the most outré shapeslike crooked fingers, blasted towards the skies as they cut through wild rubescent auroras bent over my eyes. Grinning statues of despicable winged creatures, stood like proud sentinels o’er the vast landscapes of lumbering willow trees, swayed under the somber horizons. Uneasy, my soul was gripped in breathless devastations of floating castles and singing stars, where I knew something else lurked beneath the mist and murk, crawling over the bricks. Whispers cut through the silence as galactic rumors sang through those stony corridors, “there’s not much time left...”
Curious and afraid, I didn’t respond. Only a thought: It couldn’t be.
Soon, heavy flaps kicked up dust and ash from the rank pits of the castle. Replaced with entropy’s hungry yearning in this world where none remained and all felt possible, it was only a matter of time and like so many other dreams, the Castle of Näigöths disappeared through the dark apertures of my thoughts; the place where no one goes.
CHTHONIC DREAMS
Not a day goes by when I don’t tremble at the thought of hideous things crawling underneath the bedsheets of the world. Zombified skeletons, hairy beasts, and metal golems, dripping with the muck and rust of time in an old, nameless crypt moaned and rattled their tired bodies, draped in the frail annals of time. Every day I think about them, coated in greasy, dirty possibilities, pawing at my thoughts, they tried to pull me towards a place of broken palaces under the crusty nethers of oblivion.
They’ll try again tonight, I’m sure.
I hated sleeping because of them. They skunked through a ripped abysm, bleeding from the carcass of reality where I spied my morphed reflection, flesh, and blood, doomed to relive this fuckery, over and over again. A Sisyphean nightmare of regrets and sometimes maybes, but always was he chasing my phantom self through graveyards of time and space where no one would remember me, forsake me, or dare to understand why I never slept; never thought of anything else except for what lurked underneath the bed sheets of the world.