Twilight’s Pale Reverse
The borrowed time of a hotel room
(‘It’s the nearest thing to pretending you’re dead’)
Smoking is a distraction
The smouldering cigarette end
A last star beneath the foredawn
Outcast to outcast
Neither relishing the coming hours
His head is the maquette of a skull
Gaining depth within the sculptural
Antechamber of his hands
As twilight’s pale reverse
Blisters into day
(‘Oh god, not another one’)
What god lacked in variety
The restless mind feels in malaise
Hell is only the endless now
An impossibly diminishing sameness
(‘And on the seventh day god rested,
And the eighth day drifted free,
And every iteration thereafter’)
Nothing at the End of the Day
Walking beneath the black bandage of night
I can feel the memories
Seeping through
The wounds of the waking world
As the first light of day threatens
To cauterise in reverse
I look up at where the stars should be
And consider leaving them behind
Funny how easily eternity
Can be overcome
If you really try
It’s an Inferno Out There
We were quick to express our sorrow
When the city skyline burned
To show solidarity in the face of disaster
As we gathered to watch the flames
Eating away at the facades
Exposing ourselves to the cancerous dust
Which filled the air like regret
A violent pornography
We took home for later
‘I never thought something like this could happen here’
A fellow onlooker said
Admitting to a life spent looking the other way
To a community extending no further than sight
The violence has always been here
Behind every door and curtain
A rage in thermal runaway
Which can never be put out
With bruises worn like scorch marks
Licked by flames of wayward desire
Ghostland
The fluorescent tube light strobes the shadows
With the jagged pulse of a heart monitor patient after the assault
A safety measure against the imminent dark
Down this shambles of an alleyway
Its broken cadence indicative of our failure
To inhabit the alien worlds we created
The indecipherable morse-code of that light
Keeps me awake, reminding me
Of the old BBC idents
When each new programme seemed preceded by
The ghostly chiming resonance
Of an angel’s wings in flight
When I was too young to understand
The images which followed as anything other
Than reports from a realm I could not understand
During the day the light is an annoyance
Somewhere between a lightning strike and a migraine
Once the night settles it reveals itself entirely
As just another human idea
Losing the battle against the dark
A Certain Kind of Happiness
‘It’s not altogether darkness’
So Malcolm Lowry said
Dictating into the echo-chamber
Between the bottom of two bottles
It’s a sentiment I stand beside
True, we’ve crucified ourselves at every opportunity
Made martyrs to our own misery
But there’s a stoicism to that
A street-level setting of the face against the wind
Like the brief moment of joy the fetishist feels
Before he’s choked into oblivion
Taryn Allan scribbles things into notebooks. Occasionally, these scribblings coalesce and have been known to appear in such places as the Horror Writers Association’s Poetry Showcase, Horror Sleaze Trash, A Thin Slice of Anxiety, The Beatnik Cowboy, The Pixelated Shroud and Disturb the Universe Magazine, amongst others.
