Spotted first from the starboard side, A fearful captain gazes upon the Ocean of Dreams, And there, the great green eye of Grimvael, The immortal serpent of sorrow, stares back, Its endless body stretching outward, Vanishing into distant stars.
Without warning, the serpent descends; Black scales and ocean spray shroud the sailor in mist, Creating a terrible stillness, A silence held between breaths, Before the mighty serpent erupts from the sea, Its vast eye unblinking as it crashes once more into the depths.
The creature’s wake topples the ancient ship, And as the captain treads dark water, He cannot witness the nightmare from above, As Grimvael’s immense black jaws open, Rising from beneath him in dreadful silence, Before snapping shut, Consuming sailor and ship alike, Then slipping beneath the dreaming sea for the last time, Returning the sparkling green waters To a terrible, waveless calm.
In chambers hidden beneath remembrance, Where old grief hangs like dust in ruined halls, Where silence pools in the hollows of the mind, And forgotten names drift downward like ash, There coils Grimvael, The sleepless serpent, The black-mouthed keeper of sorrows, The dream-krate of anxious souls.
No cradle bore him. No heaven suffered him to rise. He was born in the first trembling of memory, When fear first looked backward, And called itself thought.
He dwells not in flesh, Nor cavern, or sea, But in the labyrinth of recollection, Among wilted childhood gardens, Half-heard confessions, The scent of mourning rooms, The faces long buried beneath forgetting.
There he winds himself, endless and patient, Through corridors of our unfinished grief.
His mouth is black as a crypt abandoned to rain, A wound without gleam, A silence ringed in hunger. His venomous black tongue stirs there. Where no serpent hiss escapes. Only the sound of memory fraying.
Its darkness opens not outward, but inward, As though the night itself had learned to feed. From those jaws spill whispers stolen from sleeping men:
The words never spoken, The apologies rotted to bone, The dread of tomorrow, The trembling knowledge That joy departs unnoticed.
And his eyes, if eyes they may be called, Sealed in ancient shadow, for Grimvael has no need of sight. He hunts by remembrance. He tastes regret upon the spirit As wolves scent blood upon the snow. Across his body, black as drowned velvet, the scales glisten with funeral sheen, Obsidian pressed smooth, By centuries of forgotten terror.
He coils in impossible spirals, A cathedral of serpent flesh, Each curve tightening around thought itself, Until memory bends inward and becomes a prison.
Yet it is beneath him, Beneath that terrible body that horror flowers. A thousand suckers line his belly. A thousand pale mouths, Wet and patient as grave-lilies, Ringed in trembling circles. They cling, oh, how they cling. To thoughts half-born. To shame hidden beneath laughter. To old wounds one swore forgotten. To the sleepless turning of the midnight mind.
Each sucker fastens softly, almost tenderly, Drawing from memory not blood, But heartache. One drinks a mother’s sorrow. One drinks the terror of silence. Another feeds upon a lover’s absence, Upon letters unsent, Upon funerals replayed behind shut eyes. And still they hunger. They crawl unseen through dreaming, Pressing themselves to recollection Until joy grows thin and grief becomes familiar.
In fevered nights they gather, Those thousand hungry mouths, Around the trembling chambers of thought, Draining certainty, deepening shadows, Teaching the soul the old language of dread.
Thus men wake unrested, Their hearts heavy with unnamed weather, Their minds crowded by ghosts that bear no faces. For Grimvael has passed near. The Sleepless Serpent remembers what mortals bury.
He keeps the inventory of wounds. He nests in unfinished mourning. He winds himself through forgotten corridors where fear drinks quietly from memory.
And when the candle dims low, When the house falls mute, When sleep comes thin and fractured, You may feel him. A pressure in the dark. A thought returning unbidden. A sorrow without origin.
Then know, Beneath the trembling chambers of your mind, Grimvael stirs, sleepless, and eternal,
his black mouth open, his thousand suckers fastening softly, to the fragile edges of your memory,
Behind closed eyes, as we descend to sleep, Another world unfurls its gossamer veil, Where architecture born of imagination, Sculpts vast landscapes that stretch beneath, Star-filled skies to the ocean of dreams, Where silence drifts like silver mist, And memory loosens from the waking mind, To wander paths unbound by reason. Do I wake? Or walk on forever.
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.
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.
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.
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,
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.
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.
Dan Verkys 