Jack Cohen

Dark Tides

My springtime thoughts on darker days
are gone, now wrong
my mind astray.

Looking now
through these eyes,
These eyes of mine
where dark tides lay.

There comes a breeze
that chills my soul,
The breeze that comes
when the dark tides roll.

A ghost of hope
a specter of air,
Curses my mind
with memories despair.

Standing there
on that shore,
With hope now gone
and dark thoughts galore.

I look to my sides
and in horror, rejoice,
My isolation was shed
now in the company of the dead.

Littering the beach
was friends and foes,
Not one alive
just dust and bones.

Harsh lightning flashes
and in the light,
I see staring at me
eyes so bright.

So filled with fury
to describe to sight,
Would leave me mad
raving in the night.

Another flash
Did that one stir?
In this graveyard of the past
of things that once were.

A voiceless whisper
fills my ears,
Drills into my mind
and instills dead fear.

Another flash
more draw near,
They claw and crawl
towards me here.

I turn to run
to escape this plight,
But the dead surround me
trapping me this night.

I can hear their whisper
now a scream,
A scream so loud
my ears now bleed.

They grab my clothes
pulling me down,
Into this beach
of dead things drowned.

Before being pulled under
I see a final sight,
The dark beach now
bathed in pale ghost light,
There stands the specter
watching in the night.

It smiled a wretched
corpse-like grin,
Its eyes the fury
now infecting my kin.

And above the screams
I can hear its laugh,
As sand entombs me
on its behalf.

I awake with a scream
in my bed,
A dream?

The awful event
was nothing more,
Then a dark dream
lost in my mind before.

But if it was a dream
and nothing more

Why is there blood in my ears
and sand at my door?