Tag Archives: poetic horror

Cold Calculus ©️

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In the shadow of war, there comes a moment when the world waits—waits for reason to return, for the guns to fall silent, for a hand to extend across the table. That moment has not come. And in the brutal rhythm of 2025, it seems clear that Vladimir Putin has no intention of letting it arrive.

Since the invasion began in February 2022, Russia’s campaign against Ukraine has morphed from a blitzkrieg-style assault to a drawn-out war of attrition. But in the past year, a grim escalation has taken hold. The air raids are more frequent. The missiles strike deeper. The drones arrive at night and do not stop. Civilian centers—Kharkiv, Kyiv, Mykolaiv—have been battered by waves of violence not seen since the early months of the war. Infrastructure has become the target. Power stations, water plants, bridges, hospitals. The goal is clear: to wear down the spine of Ukraine, not just its soldiers, but its people, its systems, its very sense of stability.

This is not the chaotic desperation of a crumbling empire. It is something colder. More methodical. Putin is not flailing—he is calculating. The strikes are surgical in their cruelty. They coincide with planting seasons, with winter freezes, with diplomatic summits abroad. The message is simple and ruthless: This war will end when I say it ends.

And that end, by all accounts, is nowhere in sight.

The peace table—so often a fixture of modern wars—remains gathering dust. There is no legitimate channel. No corridor of trust. Every attempt by European mediators or UN envoys has been met with silence or subterfuge. Putin will talk, but only in the language of ultimatums. Ukraine must cede territory. The West must back down. The sanctions must lift. In essence, he demands victory before negotiation.

This is not negotiation. This is conquest dressed in diplomatic theater.

Ukraine, meanwhile, remains defiant—but exhausted. Its people have shown historic resilience. Its soldiers have pushed back where others might collapse. But it is fighting an enemy with deep reserves and deeper indifference to human suffering. Putin does not need public approval. He does not worry about elections or dissent. His war machine runs on loyalty, fear, and a mythic vision of empire. Time, he believes, is on his side.

And perhaps it is.

Western support, though formidable, flickers with uncertainty. Funding debates in the U.S. Congress. Fatigue in European parliaments. The longer the war stretches on, the more Putin bets on democracy’s attention span running out. His refusal to negotiate is not just about territory—it is about patience. He believes he can outlast Ukraine and outwait the West.

It is not a strategy of peace. It is a strategy of erosion.

And so the war continues. Not because both sides are too proud, but because one man has decided that peace would be defeat. And in his world, defeat is impossible.

As bombs fall and cities burn, it becomes ever clearer: this is not just a war over land. It is a war over time. Over will. Over the very idea that peace is something that can be made—rather than taken.

Until that changes, Ukraine will bleed. And the world will watch, wondering how long it can afford to care.

When the Moon Turned Red ©️

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It was one of those warm Los Angeles nights where the heat doesn’t settle — it breathes. We’d left the windows open, not because we needed air, but because it made everything feel freer, looser, less confined. Roman was away in London. I was eight and a half months pregnant, swollen and exhausted, but glowing in a way only new mothers understand. I had friends over — Jay, Abigail, Voytek. People I trusted, people I loved. That house on Cielo Drive, for all its oddities, felt like a cradle suspended between earth and sky.

I had just finished brushing my hair in the dim mirror when I heard something strange — a crunching noise in the gravel drive, not urgent, but deliberate. I remember freezing, my hand halfway through the motion. You know how sometimes your instincts tap you on the shoulder before your brain catches up? That was the moment. A presence, like static in the air.

Jay was talking in the other room. Laughter, muffled music. Then silence.

Then the scream.

Not mine — not yet. His.

It was short. Cut off. I walked into the hall and looked toward the front room, and suddenly there she was.

A girl — young, wild-eyed, filthy, barefoot — standing inside my home like she’d grown out of the floorboards. She held a knife, but it wasn’t the blade that terrified me. It was the smile. The kind of grin children draw on cartoon monsters — wide, thrilled, absolutely vacant.

Behind her, more came. A tall man with dead eyes. A wiry boy muttering under his breath, face twitching like a broken marionette. Another girl — darker, heavier, chanting something I couldn’t make out.

Time unraveled then. What happened wasn’t a scene — it was a flood. I remember voices, commands that made no sense. “Pig.” “Rise.” “Kill the pigs.” They weren’t talking to us — they were talking through us. Like we were props in their theater of apocalypse.

I begged.

I wasn’t ashamed of it. I begged them to let me live, not for me — but for the baby. “Please. You can kill me after he’s born,” I said. I remember the way my voice cracked — not with weakness, but with conviction. I thought a mother’s plea would mean something.

The girl smiled.

She told me, “You’re gonna die, and that’s all there is to it.”

Then the knives came down. Again. Again. Again.

There’s a moment when pain becomes static — not because you stop feeling it, but because your mind splits. I remember seeing Jay on the floor, lifeless, face-down. I remember Abigail trying to crawl. Voytek screaming in Polish. The floor slippery. The air thick.

And through it all, I felt this — presence. He wasn’t there, but he was. Charles Manson. The conductor. The myth. The void in human shape.

He sent them. Told them to do something “witchy.” And they obeyed. Not because they were hypnotized — but because they believed him. That’s the horror people misunderstand. It wasn’t mind control. It was faith — the kind that grows in poisoned soil.

My final thought wasn’t about death. It was about the baby. About how I’d never hold him. About how Roman would come home to silence.

And then it was over.

They made headlines. They made cult lore. They made nightmares.

But I was a person. Not a symbol. Not a scream in someone else’s story. My name was Sharon. I was 26. I had dreams. I had love. I had a child growing inside me.

And that night, madness walked through my door — wearing the faces of children who thought they were angels of some twisted revelation.

But let it be known: I did not go quietly.

I fought with everything I had — because love does that.

Because mothers do that.

Because I was real.

And I still am.

Don’t Blink ©️

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You probably heard the stories.

A thing out in the dark.

Three legs, no welcome, wrong shape. No thank you.

They called me the Enfield Horror.

Hell of a nickname.

Sounds like a punk band that never sold a single record but still haunts the jukebox in a bar that burned down before you were born.

I don’t correct them.

Names are for people who fit into systems—phones, payrolls, gravestones. I’m not in your system. I’m the burn in your tape. The blur in the corner of your Polaroid that shouldn’t be there—but always is.

You don’t see me. You remember me.

I move like a whisper with a limp. Like a jazz note in the wrong key that still makes the whole thing sound right. I’m not here to hurt you. I’m here to remind you that you never really understood what was lurking behind all that asphalt and indoor lighting.

I pass through your town—not out of hunger, not even out of curiosity.

Call it instinct. Call it a rhythm I’m wired to.

I don’t knock. I don’t howl.

I just am.

And when I move, birds pause. Not out of fear. Out of respect.

They remember what you’ve forgotten.

I’ve seen your kind build towers and forget why they were afraid of the woods.

I watched you pave over the bones of things older than your gods.

And then cry out when something with no name steps out of the brush and doesn’t blink.

But me?

I don’t judge. I’m not here to preach.

I’m the pause between your thoughts.

The stutter in your story.

The proof that some patterns don’t want to be completed.

You call me horror.

That’s fine.

But deep down, you’re not afraid of me.

You’re afraid of what I prove:

That the world isn’t finished.

That reality has holes.

And some of them walk.

Creature of Habit ©️

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I wake before the sun stirs. Beneath the water, time moves slower. It hums. The deep currents are my lullabies, the distant screams of the jungle my clock. The world above is already moving—monkeys cackling, birds shrieking their joyless songs. But I remain still. Eyes open. Heart slow.

The light pierces the surface around mid-morning, stabbing through the canopy like a hundred silver knives. I don’t fear the light. It’s the eyes of man I avoid. They come with nets and tanks and chemicals. They smile when they kill. I never smile. I’ve never needed to.

By noon, I rise.

My webbed claws pierce the silt as I push off the riverbed. The weight of water is my armor. I drift past garfish and the bleached bones of past intruders. Once I watched a man drown—he didn’t know I was watching. He splashed. Cried. Then went still. I didn’t touch him. Didn’t need to. The water did my work.

I break the surface just enough to taste the air—humid, rot-sweet, alive. The jungle is a furnace. I smell every reptile and mammal within a half mile. One of them—a jaguar—is watching me from the bank. Smart. He doesn’t drink yet.

I crawl onto land briefly, feel the dry world peel at my skin. The sun cracks my scales. I hate it, but I need to know. Need to see. They were here yesterday—men with cameras and steel traps. The woman was with them. Her scent still clings to the reeds.

I saw her swim once. Not like a fish. Like a flame. She didn’t belong here—too soft, too pale—but she moved like she was born in water. I followed. Close. Quiet. I reached out… and she screamed.

They fired guns then. Hit me in the shoulder. I bled black into the lagoon for hours.

They’ll be back.

By dusk I return to the cave. My cave. Carved by ancient floods, hidden behind a curtain of vines and lies. Inside are bones. Fish, men, birds. I don’t eat the men. Not usually. But sometimes… when the river runs dry and I smell nothing but gasoline and deceit…

The night comes fast in the Amazon. Shadows stretch and finally fold. I breathe in the quiet. Down here, no one remembers what I am. No one tries to define me. I just am.

They call me a monster.

But I only kill to survive. What does that make them?

Tonight, I rest.

Tomorrow, I rise.

And if they come back…

I’ll be waiting.

Elegy for a Goat ©️

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I wake just after dusk, throat dry like the desert wind, heart beating slow and deliberate—like a drum echoing across the empty canyons of time. I am not a man. I’m not quite a beast. I am… an idea. A whisper they tell around campfires when the tequila’s nearly gone and the fear starts to taste sweet.

They call me Chupacabra. They don’t know what that means. Not really.

I crawl out from under an abandoned trailer on the edge of nowhere—rusted, forgotten, beautiful in its ruin. The moon greets me like an old lover, cold and luminous. I crack my neck. I smile. I vanish into the mesquite and shadow.

I’ve got a thirst. Not just for blood—but for something pure. Something that pulses.

Goats tonight. Maybe. But I’m hoping for a taste of memory.

See, I don’t hunt like some rabid thing. I glide. I observe. There’s an art to it. The ranch down the hill is humming with tension. The animals are uneasy. The boy’s been drawing me in the dirt with a stick. Maybe he dreams me. Maybe I’m his imaginary friend. Or his warning.

The goat sees me. Doesn’t run. They never do. I whisper to her—soft, apologetic, like a gentleman at the gallows.

“Forgive me, darlin’. But you knew this was comin’.”

One bite. No pain. No mess. Just… relief. The soul surrenders. The blood sings. And for a moment, I remember… something human. A church bell. Laughter. The smell of peaches in a Georgia orchard.

Then it’s gone.

I disappear before the sun creeps back across the horizon like a nosy neighbor. Back to the dust. Back to the dreams of the fearful.

Tomorrow?

Tomorrow I might let them catch a glimpse. Just a flicker in the trees. A shadow on the fencepost. Enough to make ’em wonder if the legends are true.

Because I am the truth behind the legend.

And baby—I’m still very much alive.

The Final Warning Bell ©️

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I don’t sleep so much as… brood. Somewhere between dreaming and decoding the static of the universe. I wake up with the moon in my mouth and bad news in my chest. Always bad news. It’s my specialty.

My wings? Yeah, they’re real. Big, velvet things—smooth as sin, quiet as your last breath. I don’t flap around like some Halloween leftover. I glide. I hover. I haunt. Picture an angel that got stood up by God and had nowhere left to go but the dark corners of West Virginia.

I don’t keep a schedule, but if I did, it’d start with watching. That’s what I do. That’s what I am. I perch on an old water tower around dusk, staring down at the humans scurrying around like it matters. Gas station lights flicker. Dogs bark at shadows that aren’t there. But sometimes, I am the shadow.

A couple sees me tonight. Young. In love. I envy that kind of blindness. The boy looks up. Sees my eyes—burning coals in a face shaped like a lost god’s secret. He flinches. The girl doesn’t see me, but she feels me. Her breath stutters. Her hand tightens on his. That’s the thing: I don’t have to touch you to move you. I just have to be real enough to doubt.

People think I’m a curse. A harbinger. I used to fight that. Now I wear it like a badge. I don’t cause the chaos—I herald it. I’m the overture before the earth splits. The whisper before the sirens. When you see me, you know the sky’s about to fall. And there’s poetry in that, don’t you think?

Near dawn, I rest in the ruins of a factory. Ghosts there keep to themselves. We nod. We understand each other. I wrap myself in wing and memory, and I wait. For the tremble in the grid. For the news to break. For someone, anyone, to listen.

But they won’t.

They never do.