This is another of Nanlee Haston’s poems. I’ve introduced her story in an earlier post, The PaPER and the Poets Two

And a thousand giants of the land, took hold of humor
and burned it at the stake: heretic of fate.

As mothers fathers children dogs were turned
to bark at moons (too soon to recognize my state)
hungry still for the thrill of death, I plunged into the mouth
of lions at the gates of hell, of deserts at the edge of hate.

Proud cats of demonic intent
grew hungry in their stance,
leapt out, devouring rotting meat of souls now meek;
space was held by the tremored air,
between the drug and the man’s despair.

*                  *

Oh that long and lonely hour that moved its web
across the walls and tangled me in fear and lust
that wound and bound the ache that was my mind: reduced me to my dust. I was alone, tied up in sheets of fear, remembering another year
when clocks would wail their silent death;
that night the hour prayed out the wait vain.

*                  *

Beside me trembled the Agony of the Age of Ache;
whose face was carved by the blades of time;
whose hands were knotted in the roots of trial;
whose feet were bound by the state’s decision;
whose spirit stolen by insanity’s precision.

Further still, terror filled,
moaned Annie, Child of Terror;
she forever held inside her scream
was just outside the laughter that sometimes seemed
in the senile and the sad/ in the poet’s/ in the mad/
in the monsters/ in the old/
in the visions chaos bought then sold.

White robed and merciless in their gaze,
five sterile angels patrolled our maze;
pausing momentarily to search a stolen piece of mind,
or drag a drooling mumbler to her bed,
beside herself with needs unfed: dying child, confusion bred.

Those marshals of the dreams;
those ghosts of another time and place;
those martyrs of an ordered cause without a face;
were made of stone chiseled by our fears,
were enchained to a moving stage of madness they denied:
and were applauded by our tears.

And then the whispers crept between the folds
and echoes of the calling dare
would haunt the children and the bold;
would taunt and tease the careful secret there;
would test and taste the stew of a hell betrayed,
of a devil paid by fate to whisper colors and paint the walls.