Author: Dan Verkys

Australian visual artist and dabbler in music and literature.
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Grimvael: An Introduction

I am currently writing (and rewriting) a poem to introducte a creature I have conjured into being. As often happens when I am world-building, I find myself becoming consumed by detail, wandering too deeply into imagination. Grimvael will reveal himself in the coming days, though in truth, he has always been here. Within me, yes, but also woven throughout the imagery and symbolism of this website.

So, what is Grimvael?

Grimvael is a mythical serpent of the mind, an imagined creature that feeds upon anxiety and dwells within forgotten memory. A vast black-scaled serpent of immeasurable length, his underbelly is lined with a thousand feeding suckers that cling to fear, grief, sorrow, and memory itself. He is my visual representation of anxiety made flesh (or scale).

He is not born of darkness alone, but weaponised by innermost emotions and our most intimate fears. In moments of panic, dread, or overwhelming anxiety, it is as though Grimvael feeds, coiling tighter, constricting, drawing life and energy from the very suffering he consumes.

Dark? Yes, perhaps.

Yet there is something strangely empowering in giving form to what once remained hidden, something invisible, unnamed, and shapeless. By giving anxiety a face, a body, a myth, it ceases to be an unseen force lurking in the shadows. Now, it is Grimvael.

I realise this may sound a little mad to some. But perhaps that is the quiet beauty of creativity and imagination: they grant us language for our fears, shape to our struggles, and sometimes, strength we never knew we possessed.

Grimvael concept
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Beyond The Weeping Gate

I’ve been me so many times now,
That I am lost in the echoes of myself;
I hear them calling, hear them calling,
From beyond the weeping gate.

There the shadows kneel in silence,
Wearing masks I abandoned in softer years,
Their mouths stitched shut with old confessions,
Their eyes like drowned lanterns beneath black water.
They beckon without movement,
A congregation of former griefs,
Gathered where memory rots in black corridors,
And time hangs damp with suffering.

The house within me has grown cavernous,
Its stairways descending into impossible rooms
Where sorrow sits upright beside the fire,
A patient dust covered harbinger of grief.
It knows me by every mask I have worn,
Calls each by name in the language of mourning,
And pours black wine into trembling hands
That no longer remember which flesh is mine.

I hear them calling, hear them calling,
The selves I starved, the selves I feared,
The silent twins of all my failures,
Their fingers pale upon the rusted latch.
Beyond the weeping gate they gather,
Neither wholly dead nor wholly memory,
Waiting where the dark folds inward,
Where sorrow flowers into sullen shapes.

For doom has lived beside me always,
A patient guest seated near the fire,
Its hands folded neatly in shadow,
Its smile thin as winter beneath the skin.
It speaks not of endings but of returning,
Of circles drawn in grief and dust,
Until I no longer know if I am haunted,
Or merely wandering the ruins of myself.

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Hewn Together

Stitched together from corpselike flesh,
Two fractured halves now beat as one,
Two broken souls once torn apart,
Dance beneath the waking sun.

But soft, hewn together forever,
Two lovers force light from the dark,
Like yonder light through broken windows,
Kindling fire from a dying spark.

Loneliness no longer lingers here,
Seated in the dress circle alone,
The symphony of this communion,
Turns silence into something known.

And when life’s chaotic theatre closes,
When the stage lies empty and still,
Two hearts remain in quiet defiance,
Beating together beyond all will.

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Nameless and hated

I hold a warm fondness for his stitched despair,
For Frankenstein’s Adam, condemned by a stare;
Made without consent, despised for his frame,
Cast into hatred before he knew his own name.

He was gentle at first, though sorrow ran deep,
Self-loathing haunted the wounds he would keep;
Yet still in his ruin, his battered heart longed,
To love and be loved, where he never belonged.

Pushed past his breaking, undone by neglect,
By the hands that had made him, then cast him reject;
The cruelest of makers saw truth far too late,
Not spectre or wretch, but a soul formed by its fate.

Forever lost in icy silence, abandoned, alone,
He wanders through sorrow no mercy has known;
And still I feel grief for that heart torn asunder,
That unwanted thing they named with such thunder….
Monster.

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Gloom

Why do you come here, is it for the gloom?
For the restless shadows of my darkened room,
I’ll make no apology, for I prefer to write,
With words of melancholy that arrive like night.

Over softened themes dressed up in colourful bloom,
Where joy survives untouched by grief or doom,
I’ve seen everything colourful eventually lose lustre.
It does have a place, but it won’t pass my muster.

My mind drifts dim where others shine bright,
Here, darkness looms never far from sight,
Even as a young boy, I could never bring,
As Poe wrote, my passions from a common spring.

My mind can be dreary and abnormally bleak,
And I prefer others to use light and flowery speak,
But if like me you find some comfort in gloom,
Stay with me a while here, in my dark little room.

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For Willow

Today arrived like unfamiliar weather,
a strange sky stitched from joy and melancholy,
an emotional cocktail I could not name,
sweet on the tongue, bitter at the edges,
leaving me wandering the quiet chambers of myself.

My granddaughter,
how can something so small,
confuse the structure of a grown man’s heart?

To see her smile,
to hold her warm against me,
to kiss that angelic softness of her face,
to meet those impossible eyes
as they searched mine with solemn curiosity,
a gaze not yet burdened by disappointment,
not yet taught to look away.

I am undone in her presence.

The great walls I spent years building,
brick by bitter brick,
those fortresses of caution and survival,
fall soundlessly around me.
Laid waste by tiny fingers,
by laughter still learning its own shape,
by the unbearable innocence of trust.

And yet, strangely,
joy enters carrying melancholy by the hand.

Why?

Why does happiness arrive
and make me feel unworthy of its touch?
Why, standing in the warmth of love,
do I instinctively search for shadow?

Perhaps it is fear.

The quiet distance I feel from my own children
lingers like weather between mountains,
and somewhere inside me
a frightened voice whispers,
one day, perhaps, this too.

Will she drift beyond my reach
as time gathers speed?
Will I become another fading figure
in photographs touched by dust?

I want her to think well of me,
as I think of my own grandfather,
whose memory still stands,
like an old tree against a changing sky,
steady, kind, impossible to replace.

And maybe I am afraid,
afraid of failing at something
so desperately important.

Afraid that love, once given,
may somehow not be enough.

Or perhaps the melancholy comes
from feeling time itself moving through me,
the quiet ache of growing older,
of sensing relevance soften at the edges,
of wondering whether one becomes
less central to the story of a family
without ever noticing the moment it happens.

Yet Willow,
dear, impossible Willow,
you are perfection.

And I love you
with a force I did not believe remained in me,
a forgotten chamber of the heart
suddenly flung open to light.

My dark heart worries endlessly,
yes, it circles storms that may never come,
counts losses before they exist,
remembers suffering too well.

But perhaps…

perhaps all the torment,
all the years of stumbling through shadow,
all the grief carried quietly like stone,
were for those stolen moments we shared today:

to see my daughter happy,
steady in her own becoming,
to witness the love they have built,
to hold in trembling hands
the fragile proof that tenderness survives.

Maybe this,
this small girl with searching eyes,
this impossible softness,
this fierce ache of love,
was waiting at the far end of all my sorrow.

And if she was my purpose here,
if all roads bent quietly toward this moment,
toward Willow,

then I think, at last,

I could be content.

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Emerald Ocean of Sleep

Timeless this walk has been,
Upon the plateau of broken dreams,
High above the sleeping sea,
Where starry skies have carried me.

Now far away in the land of dreaming,
Where warm white sands wait gleaming,
Scented winds blow a gentle breeze,
As I sit on the beach of the dreaming sea.

Crimson birds float through azure skies,
Serenading dreamers with lyrical cries,
But they fall deaf upon my sullen ear,
As whispering waves call me near.

Under the emerald ocean I now wade,
Down where the saddest dreams are made,
It becomes so dark that I cannot see,
And I’m lost once more inside of me.

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The Haunted Halls Within

Torment, torment, anxiety brings such sweet sorrow,
The dim grinding of gears within a mind left dark and hollow,
I have waxed lyrical on my fears, on my oldest friend named Death,
Who lingers at my threshold, patient, cold, awaiting my final breath,
His presence is an icy murmur threaded deep through marrow’s ache,
A keeper of forgotten names and vows I failed to make,
Yet still I pace these haunted halls where fractured thoughts convene,
Among the rust and ruin of all that might have been,
For ignorance bears honeyed lips while poison stains her tongue,
And grief hums ancient hymns where youth once brightly sung,
While somewhere in the blackened hush beyond this mortal veil,
A deathly silence waits for me, with open arms forever pale.

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Within Amber’s gaze

Her eyes shine through my darkness like galaxies,
Starfields illuminating the darkest reaches of my being,
Ancient constellations stitched through wounds left unnamed,
Their silver language quieting the storms that I hide in my mind,
In Amber’s gaze, the night bends softly toward mercy,
And even the shadows seem reluctant to remain,
For where her light gathers, forgotten chambers awaken,
Dust-covered hopes stirring like embers beneath cold ash.

I have grown cold, hardened by loss and the ravages of time,
Hued from cold black granite, weather-beaten, broken but true,
A monument shaped by tempests no hand could shelter me from,
Edges worn by grief, yet refusing surrender to ruin,
The years have carved their silence deep into my bones,
Leaving echoes where warmth once lingered unafraid,
Yet beneath the stone, beneath the fractures and the frost,
Some forgotten ember in me leans still toward her distant fire.

For she is with me, and I with her, eternity will have to wait,
We dance together at the edge of the deep green ocean of sleep,
Where dreams drift like drowned stars beneath a moonless tide,
And silence folds around us like velvet curtains drawn by unseen hands,
The dark no longer hollow, but rich with whispered tenderness,
My bride’s breath is a lantern glowing faintly against endless dusk,
As though time itself pauses to watch our fragile orbit turn,
Two weathered souls suspended between ruin and becoming.

Should morning call us back with its pale and restless hands,
Still I shall carry her constellations beneath my fractured ribs,
A hidden firmament burning softly through granite and grief,
For love, once kindled in darkness, learns the language of enduring.

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Emptiness

The poisoned blade of emptiness breaks skin,
Even while standing amid a nameless crowd,
Where emotions contend in primordial tourney,
Like crows fighting over a bloated corpse,
And I, a husk among their fevered murmuring,
Drift unseen through the crush of borrowed faces,
A stranger even to the chambers of my own breast,
Watching my thoughts circle like carrion birds,
Pecking at old wounds hidden beneath the tongue,
While some forgotten part of me stands distant,
Coldly observing the slow unmaking within.