Skeleton Key

My abode—
A victorian vacuum—
Is a voracious vampire.
Its fangs, pillars of pain, sink into the synaptic mesh—
Forming an dreadful, damnable, dooming doorway.
Within, the foyer gorily greets
With autophagic consciousness.
A grand staircase winds upward; the attic—
Cobwebbed and dust-blanketed, filled with
Repression’s ruin,
Each box, draped painting,
A portal to perpetual punishing pain.
Below, the bedrooms of bedlam
Bring tormented dreams—
Restlessness remains.
Windowless, wind creaks each board—
Destruction is this spire’s shaky sound.
The main floor—only foyer and stairs—
Leave little option for movement—
Vertical valet is the only way—
The ascent leads harrowed hope,
The descent—
A fall into a
cylindrical cellar—
Delivers with
dramatic drop
Into a populated
Prison where
Cannibals eat from
The inside out.
An abode of
Abomination,
Constructed
Without hope
Of any real
Deconstruction.
Death comes slowly
Down in drips
Of dew, moisture,
To tenderize flesh
And to preserve parched pain.
Escape is elusive—nay—it never comes.
Once locked away, the cold chamber
Changes fast into a furnace of fury,
Where hell’s damnation delivers
Dreadful, dastardly, dominating
Torment only killed by definite
Encephalon expiration and
The dealings of death.

© 2025 Tristan Robert Lange. All rights reserved.

Tittu