At the Edge of the Midnight Woods
Have you ever wakened with your heart pounding because you’ve just had a nightmare, where a parade of weird shapes, weird scenarios, and abstract thoughts that don’t in any way fit together? The images make absolutely no sense have somehow run rampant and fill your head. For some reason the line “At the edge of the midnight woods” I read triggered my creative juices to flow into the following poem.
At the edge of the midnight woods
Roam bizarre shapes wrapped in dark hoods
Nightmares haunting bedtime dreams
Severe specters filled with harsh screams
At the edge of midnight’s forest
Spirits whisper in the darkness
Dizzying heights, bottomless lows
Distorted, rippled shadows flow
At the edge of midnight’s thicket
 Terrors rush from fearful spigots
At the edge of the midnight copse
Black fear laughs at the death of hopes
Shuffling zombies mime silent songs
Devils march waving spear’s three prongs
At the edge of midnight bower
Where werewolves howl and ghosts cower
A weird winds whirls and terrors dwell
Dark shades of Hades, flames of Hell
At the edge of the midnight groves
Masked friends appear undead in droves
Distorted, twisting facts as lies
Where dying lives and living dies.
At the edge of midnight’s timber
Walk ghosts with limbs loose and limber
Twisted landscapes turned upside down
Ghastly scenes, realities drown
At the edge of the midnight trees
Decayed branches bared by disease
Slowed by cobwebs that cling and grasp
Serpents slither with scales that rasp
At the edge of midnight’s shadows
Light disappears and darkness flows
Only waking do nightmares flee
Only waking are we set free
Waking nightmares are understood
At the edge of the midnight wood.