Abyss

He sits in the abyss,
the price of his ways.
A would-be conqueror
now a shivering wretch.

His prison is vast, cavernous,
pits tunnels, molten furnaces,
frozen hollows, rancid streams,
cavities crawling with pestilence.
Things unseen by mortal eyes
stalk the tunnels,
forge new fissures.

The first to see this place,
he repents his mistakes
and all they cost him.
Familial faces drift from memory
along with their disdain
when their son, wrapped in chains,
cast into a rent in the earth,
disappeared from the world.

The demons hunt him underground.
He takes shelter in wretched crevices,
repents and regrets, begs for mercy
from those he betrayed
and those who followed him.

The cold, the fire, the torment
eventually convince him;

Repentance has a sour tang,

vengeance tastes succulent.

Hell's Daffodils

A short time ago in a valley of snow
lived a man on a bike with nowhere to go.
He wanted to ride on the valley roads
but in his garden a flower started to grow.

A daffodil was sprouting despite the cold,
and it grew much faster than a blob of mould.
The man watched it bloom next to a garden gnome.
while the blizzard still threatened to bury his home.

A strange thing happened in the flowerbed;
two daffodils sprouted their bright yellow heads
next to the first above the settling snow,
but it was never foreseen how many would grow.

Ten times ten times ten the daffs all emerged,
before the man knew it the flowers converged
on his small house with strangling roots and stems,
at twelve feet tall, all of the daffs followed this trend.

The man was trapped in a nest of roots.
He remembered when he saw those fresh young shoots,
their brand new petals, their sumptuous glow.
Now he panicked as they burst in through the window.

And so it was that the man met his end
in the worst snowstorm he could comprehend.
When the blizzard cleared the house was still there,
entombed in the tendrils of the daffodils' snare.

Howling

They howl in the night
when no animal stirs,

they howl in the darkness
where all sounds blur.

They hunt down the weak,
the small and the defenceless,

with such ferocity
to bend a victim's senses.

Eyes electrified at night,
ghostly forms in the trees,

the bravest of beasts
all fall to their knees.

The woods they haunt
are in their autumn throes,

and their presence besets
all manner of woes,

they clad the forest
in a cloak of screams,

then slip away silently
never again to be seen.