The December Selected Poet is Wesley D. Gray

Please feel free to email Wesley at: wesleydgray@yahoo.com

REFLECTIONS IN THE DARK

From out the mirror’s edges
we are born into a light
we do not see or comprehend,

just a blur of something beyond,
a hint that shimmers,
silhouettes reflected in the gray.

From out the pane’s other side
a darkness will arise
to eclipse this fragile plane,

a reality too real to swallow,
and this we will perceive
as simply shadow.

COLLEEN OF WINTER’S CALLING

She stalks the wooded dreams of boys emerging into manhood.
Maiden of Winter. Mother of Wolves. Huntress of the Dark.

Something more than Human flares behind her fervent golden eyes.
A ghost? A demon infused in sultry flesh? Or a cloaked tormentor perhaps—

a Dark Master that tugs upon the breath of her strings,
tethering her soul with ethereal chains from the bowels of the Nether.

The dream world she walks upon is the ballet of her seduction,
a lure to stroke the naive desires of her young prey,

dragging them from the warmth of adolescent beds,
out into the cruel and numbing death of a solitary Winter.

They’ll find her standing in the drifts of freshly fallen snow,
the silhouette of her cold curves carved amidst the ice-shackled trees

as wolf pelts drop from her shoulders,
painting her nudity blue in the gleam of a weeping Solstice moon.

She’ll draw them close, then down into fevered passion
to find mutual pleasure on a slaughtered bed of ghost wolf skins.

And when at last she strikes to drain them,
it is not alone for the refinement of their meat and blood,

but more to invoke an ancient taboo ritual,
sending their essence into the planes below and beyond

to initiate with a Dark Master all their own,
shackling their souls to the frozen abyss, where she too found rebirth.

THE CENTURION’S LAMENT

Eclipsed by the end of time,
he feels the futility of remorse,
yet tears carve out his face
like the hollowed-out gullies
of a forlorn mountains’ memory.

He watches as the salts
of old enemies melt
into the ghosts of forest beds,
the dwellers’ roots soaking up screams
from the stains of blood-mired ground.

He holds the gift,
now engraved in his granite hands,
a glassy husk of crimson wine
filled with the glossy remnants
of enslaved human dust.

The roses,
lost of blush and piercing thorn,
grown sick from moss and lichen breath,
curdle in the heat
of pulsing nebular storms.

Eclipsed by the end of time,
he waits for the Rebirth to revolve,
in hopes he might return
to the time before he missed her
and she gave up in waiting.

Wesley D. Gray is a writer, an author of fiction, and a poet. He is the author of the chapbook Come Fly with Death: Poems Inspired by the Artwork of Zdzislaw Beksinski, among other things. When he isn’t writing, Wesley enjoys a wide variety of geeky activities, but mostly, tabletop gaming with family and friends. He resides in Florida with his wife and two children.

Learn more at: WesDGray.com.