The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Fifth Annual Collection

Stricken by favors of a darkened place

Falling through limbo

upon fractured wings

Greeted in deserts by scorpion stings

Glaring at Love without eyes in its face.

Sifting through dust

that was once a great God

Laughing in echoes

that fade without trace

Twined in our graveclothes

of gossamer lace

Peering in chasms

where light is outlawed.

Tears fall like knives into the fearful pit,

Spirits glint like moonbows in jet cascade

Sought by Fisher Death

for his waiting spit.

Fear not. Even this indignity will fade.

Trampled beneath our impossible dreams,

Vanished in rips in reality’s seams.

Death came walking in my garden

of pale white lilies and blood-red roses.

A stone angel crumbles in her pool,

her broken lips spouting silent prayers.

Nestlings cease their hungry song,

moveless midst the branches.

I alone rushed to Death’s embrace,

my heart quickened with desire—

“Who fears me not,” said Death

“comes to me no sooner,”

and coldly I was cast aside.

Death came walking in my house

where shadows shroud the rooms;

grief resounds; sadness looms because

a child from me was taken.

“Take me as well; take me!”

was my prayer,

yet Death spumed me anew.

Years have passed;

the world has passed me by;

and I lay gasping on a lonesome bed.

“Turn from me a while,” I begged

of the skeletal presence,

who proclaimed,

“The sad, the elderly, the maimed,

or the quick and strong —

to me, all are the same.”

Then with Death I went walking

and I looked behind to see my life

with so much left undone.

“No,” I whispered. “No,” and “No.”

But Death said softly, “Yes. ”