October 25 - Shadow

By Cliff Lake

 

October 25

     Shadow

 

Lightning-struck,

It yet lives,

Once vibrant,

Green and giving,

Now shattered,

Twisted, broken,

Harmed.

A misshapen remnant,

Clinging to a life near end,

Still sustained,

Bolstered and buoyed by

Something…

 

October arrives.

The season marks changes:

Thinning airs,

Longer echoes,

Lengthened shadows.

One falls starkly black:

A grasping image perhaps,

Spindly and somehow substantive,

A screaming imprint without sound,

A sooted portraiture of agonized form,

An effigy not quite lifeless,

A likeness of pained being.

 

Hurrying passersby do not cross this mar,

Unthinking, they step around,

Taking to gutter or grass,

Uneasy avoidance.

Nor do they heed its appearance,

To look is to fall,

A known accounted in primal instinct,

The mind will not acknowledge:

Such aberrations lead only to reason unhinged,

Then lost.

Still,

For some,

There is a dim calling,

A whisper,

A lure…

 

Through the day it crawls,

A cleft of murk and dimness,

A casting from aggrieved existence,

A laceration in this plane,

A cutting that goes deeper with every hour:

This is the way into the no way out,

A slash in the veil,

A portal to never,

The door to the everfall.

As twilight approaches,

It inks darker…

 

Twilight.

This is the hour.

This is the feed.

The heedless,

The distracted,

The rash and the unguarded,

Easy quarry.

It only needs wait.

Even under moonless skies,

There will be this shadow,

This shade murmuring soundless,

A siren in gloom,

A chasm dull and hungry,

Rent upon the ground,

Indescribably patient.

One look here is insanity,

One step within is loss.

This is not shadow,

It is unlife.

It is calling…

 

Cliff Lake 10/25/2025

Copyright © Clifford Lake 2025

Location: Wichita, KS, USA

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