The God of Dark Fantasy Prose-Poetry

In fall I bloom from waning light, inhale the air of brightly dying leaves. In winter I stretch across iron skies and bathe in blue starlight. Come spring I’ll fragment into a million tired blackbirds and merge with summer storms. Always, it seems, my energies wax and wane. For hours, days, weeks at a time, I may meet not a soul. But whatever the hour, whatever the season, I keep to routine: stroll the lanes, admire the moon, wait for summoning. And when called upon, gloom and beauty uncoil at my feet like young dragons.

I came into proper existence during an autumn equinox. Oh, I remember it well! Enticed from a soft pool of candlelight on an old writing desk. Brought forth by a man whose dark eyes beamed decadent dreams—a man called Baudelaire. All that night we wrote, our energies intertwined in a spectral dance wherein I sewed beastly wings to the black, faceless worms of his subconscious—ideas he promptly snatched from their chittering flight and imprisoned in prose-poems.

Before that night I was an aimlessly wandering particle of dream, a moth in the deep caverns of Man’s collective unconscious. An embryonic muse if I may—little known, and rarely summoned. But that was the night, that was the collaboration, which propelled me out of my nebulous aspect! And after which, in watery reflections and moonlit windows, I began to see, though faintly, the azure eyes and coal black wings of my true form. How the poet did this I do not know—the power of the genius mind may be, in and of itself, a creator of gods and demons.

And divine I became! Made a deity, as it were, of dark prose-poetry; borne through the haunted portal of Baudelaire. I think now of those we influenced—Rimbaud, Smith, Pugmire, etc.—who conjured my spirit and channeled my energies into the content of their ever-fantastical compositions. Who forged for me a static identity and furthered my status as a muse-god. Who, by presenting our collaborations to the world, led me to the throne of my current incarnation: the God of Dark Fantasy Prose-Poetry.

First published in Spectral Realms in 2022.