Unforgotten Horrors

The bells of fever toll within the ear,

A pulsing throb, a rhythm born of fear.

I wake inside a fractured pane of sight,

Where iron steps resound through broken night.

The hallway hums with cold, electric breath,

Where men lie curled in quiet dread of death.

They claw at doors and vanish out of view,

As if the walls might spare what horrors knew.

In chambers thick with velvet rot and stain,

The women writhe in hunger edged with pain.

Their fingers clutch at throats in blind despair,

While madness drifts like poison through the air.

A thousand eyes unmoor me where I stand,

They speak in tongues I cannot understand.

I break away, I tear the silence wide,

And flee the scent where burning bodies bide.

The sky was ash, the earth a shattered bone,

A world laid bare, no refuge left to own.

I passed the cattle cars of rusted red,

The heaps of shoes, the unaccounted dead.

The forest drew me deep in root and thorn,

To hide me where no living soul is sworn.

Yet there dwelt kin, a family of the wood,

Whose sacred name I never understood.

Their prayers were sharp, their mercy but disguise,

A quiet snare beneath familiar eyes.

A hunted thing, cast far from any known,

Where nightshade blooms in soil of flesh and bone.

I woke in frost, my heart a beating drum,

As if the buried past had bid me come.

A vision vast, from hollow depths of sleep,

Where restless ancestors refuse their keep.

They stir the blood long spilled, not left to fade,

A debt that neither time nor earth has paid.

Not gone, but waiting in the marrow’s tone,

A past that lives, though never fully known.