Dead City

The city is haunted,
filled with the shuffling dead.

Someone's nightmare broods
on the rim of my waking sleep;
it wears a man's clothes, a child's smile,
and it leans, a malevolent slant,
in the recessed doorways of periphery.

It moves by me down night streets,
past buildings like tombstones.
Gutterplates and cornerstones
bear names of the irrelevant doomed;
anathema writ by those who came before.

Now it's ahead, tripping the dark fantastic
along the edge of my watering lid,
a lurid writhe in rhythm to the hiss of my mind.
It beckons, silent coos of seduction,
drawing near the cold press of it's regard.

The city is haunted.
Winds keen through barren streets,
pushes past buildings like watchful crypts,
scatters faces on the skittering strains of a howl.

I see it beyond,
someone's nightmare dancing with my own;
one mad ghost entwined with another.