The Nightmare Collector

by Bruce Boston

Each night he calls you

for the leading role

in his gallery

of ancestral tableaus

that trails back

through the Pleistocene

to the red primeval.

From the endless slashes

in his voluminous greatcoat

you can feel the heat

of captured bodies

invade your rumpled bed

with delirium and fever,

you can smell a brassy

sediment of tears.

From the hollow blackness

of his flapping sleeves

you can hear the pulse

and thump of unborn shadows,

a dense hysteric fugue

winding up and down

the bones of your sleep.

The nightmare collector

waits on the landing

in the unlit hall

where the instruments

of ablation are arranged

on cold leather pallets,

where the dreamer's

balustrade of terror

rushes across landscapes

of a darkening retina,

where snakes coil about

your arms and ankles

and draw you down

bodily into a forest

of bloodstained hair.

Click Below to read

Carnival of Ghosts

by Bruce Boston and Marge Simon