Tiny creatures, eerie and child like visit me in the nights I am sleepless
playing games of hide and seek under my eyelids where in half dreams
I see them watching with their over sized heads the shape of rotting melons
and their sunken in eyes, hard, endless dark pits of decaying innocence

taunting me with their cries that echo through the darkness like a haunting lullaby followed by the wicked laughter pouring out of open mouths stretched wide like bloody gaping wounds to expose worm infested flesh between teeth
razor sharp ‘neath the snarling, slobbering stench of their filthy evil grins
as they stand in the distance of a foggy water’s edge

vanishing after spitting fruitless seeds into the dirty drowning rivers that act as mirrors swallowing their reflections along with the discarded corpses floating by in heaps of broken flesh and battered bones that resemble the shadows of grown men and women turned inside out, morphing back to their youth all the way back to the days they were or maybe never conceived

Poem/Image by Debbie Berk