Gary William Crawford is the May Editor's Pick Poet
You can email Gary at: gothicpt12@aol.com
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL EXPERIMENT STATION
There are rats everywhere
and there are no other living
things to eat to stay alive.
I am trapped in this
psychological experiment
station in the Shadow City
where there are
no doors or windows
and nothing to eat
but the rats.
The station is one of the more
hellish places in the city.
Here they try to squelch
any behavior that subverts
the powers of the leaders
and high priests.
The building is a perfect
rectangular box that has
only one place to enter or exit,
and out of that door come
the newly transformed people,
but they say not everyone survives.
The evil psychiatrists
in the Shadow City
are in collusion
with the monitors of mystery,
those wicked lawmen,
to make me their subject
and clock my horror
in the hidden cameras
that penetrate the walls.
They know I hate them,
but that is what they want.
I scream, cursing them to
the most reverent hell
of the place.
In time I become so hungry
that I decide to eat one of the rats.
But before I can
the rats they look at me
with their red eyes
waiting to slowly nibble
me away with their tiny teeth,
but what they don’t
tell you is at that when
they finish with me,
they eventually
devour each other.
MYSTERIES OF LIGHT AND SHADE
The shadows have no sources.
They climb steps,
go across walls,
but they come from no one.
I see a shadow orchestra
with shadows dancing
to a ghostly polka.
The sounds are real
but the people
and instruments are not.
I scream in anger
because this should not be.
But then, to my horror,
I see that I have no shadow at all.
READING SHADOWS
Reading is difficult in the Shadow City.
The wicked lawmen—those monitors of mystery—
make sure that readers cannot concentrate.
They don’t want them to like it too much
because they might begin to make sense
of the Shadow City and the evil at its core.
They might start thinking too much,
and that is what the high priests fear so.
There are no libraries or bookstores
and the schools have mandatory brain-washing
as part of the curriculum.
They say they believe in “tough love.”
It’s all for their own good.
But I, a young, frightened student,
discovered that I could read shadows,
and I began to question what they taught me.
There was something about my gift
of reading shadows that allowed my brain
to be free of their brain washing.
Liberated, I managed to find others
who could read shadows,
and we formed our own school
that gave us a way out.
Finally, in finding others, we were free.
THE RUINED CHURCH
The place has been here for thousands of years.
Now in decay, like my aging self,
it turns up in my dreams
that are mostly nightmares.
At one time it was populated by noble
visitors of one of the greatest
families of the nation.
But as time passed
it became more decadent—
a death in life,
that is so much like the sorrows
of my life, my mind corroded
by those hellish thoughts
that I welcomed.
But I am not evil—
just a piece of broken stained glass
from a window in the nave.
I hear the choir that is dead
sing so strangely
that their vocals sound like laughter.
They are laughing at me,
and I scream in agony as I become
one with the chipped statues,
symbols of a religion
that is, like me,
a broken man in a broken world.
The poetry books of Gary William Crawford, The Shadow City and The Phantom World, have been on the final ballot for the Stoker award from the Horror Writers Association. Gary is the author of the poetry collections Poems of the Divided Self and In Shadow Lands, as well as the short story collections Gothic Fevers and Mysteries of Von Domarus. Gary is a scholar of Gothic literature and has published Robert Aickman: An Introduction, J. Sheridan Le Fanu: A Bio- Bibliography, and Ramsey Campbell, and is the author of the poetry collection Voices from the Dark. He has edited the journal Gothic and the poetry magazine Night Songs, and now he edits the free online journal Le Fanu Studies.
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