Yeah, I realize this "poem" is more prose-y than my others, but it's still a poem at its dark and foreboding heart. This one is fairly dark, so if you're looking for happy stuff, you should probably go elsewhere.

~~~

The empty attic was cold, the bare wooden floor scarred from where the sun had once crawled. A little window hung behind a tattered, moth-devoured curtain through which light streamed onto the floor of my last sanctuary. A name had been carved into the bleached window arch; a single name that still burned with the love of a time long past, of love long forgotten, yet still its empty promises rang through the air. This was once our home, our last refuge from the harsh world. Outside the frost encrusted window eyes would peer and pierce the old pane of glass, eyes once of lapis but long since faded of color, eyes that enchanted and enthralled; eyes that beckoned me from the sanctuary of the attic back to that harsh world with promises to find what I had lost. One day, I obliged.

The stairway was lit only by diffracted light that streamed in from the attic. Shadows clung to the walls and steps. As I descended they climbed on my body and danced upon it. They whispered too. They whispered words long forgotten and long adored- long abhorred; promises of sweet nothingness and haunting memories. Each step down the shadows grew and told more fantastic, more devouring secrets of the past. Each step down they grew more voracious and bold, and began to tear at my body with their temporal claws and fangs, until they cascaded upon me in a drive of insanity and chaos. Then, the steps ended and the shades were lost in the dark once more, and I stood before the gate to hell, sealed by a single latch. I broke the seal.

A corridor lay before me, shades drawn in and shadows cast upon every wall. A man that I had not seen for years regarded me from the length of the hall. He was flanked by wolves howling and nipping at his feet, but he paid no heed and walked towards me as I, him. He was the man in my mirror, my past, and the wolves tore through his legs, howling, growling. He stumbled and fell before me, eyes without a plea. The wolves sang their song and nipped the air around my feet. They howled and I left to a room made of glass.

There was no door save the one I entered, where the wolves howled their hunting song. Another man sat before me in a wicker chair, the only ornamentation in the room, but light filled the room completely, light reflected from the snow outside. The man asked a question that I did not understand. He smiled, and I understood. There was no place to hide. There was no place to run.