Vul Ravin,                            
Forest of endings,
Where all light comes to naught,
And every path is swarmed by peril.
All things immense, virulent and fatal
Seek the flame of life on which to feast,
And every organism seeks to savor
The merest glimmer of its illumination.
Lurid blossoms in an opalescent dance of hues
Hide viperous spines whose bite brings
Frenzy, sweat-bright-lunacy and death;        
And the silence is ever fractured by cries,       
While gyring forms fill the air with slaughter.
  
A hungry forest of titanic black trees               
Teems with quills and talons, spikes and teeth--
Leagues of life insatiable, ever prowling.
Only death finds comfort here,
In quiet pools poisonously colored
And lined with ageless bones,
Upon whose mirrored surfaces
No human eye has stared,
No mortal mind has grasped          
Or realized more than fear.
Vul Ravin,                                 
Forest of terror.
Vul Ravin,
Forest of death.

This poem won 2nd place in the Best Poem category of the Preditors and Editors Awards. Well deserved!

If all the seas were blood,
What ships might ply those crimson waves?
What black sands feel their cold embrace?
The sands of a world of basalt and onyx
Pounded by a billion years of bloody breakers
Into bizarre shapes of Nightmare....
 
All is still and filled with the sound of endless, blooming crests
Crashing eternally upon a  lifeless world.
A bloated, carmine sun hangs in a claret sky--  
The stale air stirs not a grain upon the shore--
Red mists rise from the wine-stained rocks
And ride the wave tops like scarlet dragons.
The weight of eons compresses the very atmosphere,
As if it could press the vital fluid from time itself.
But in this tension there is only emptiness
And the scourging of sanguine waves.  

The black interstices between branch and leaf
Crawl with viscous black presences;
Around me the trees are alive with black shapes
That whisper mad riddles and half glimpsed terrors,         
While the trees wave in hypnotic rhythms
That seize my mind and drag my soul
Down shadowed corridors that know no end,            
The darkness ever growing in the plunge toward nothingness.
Yet the spaces of the trees careen on
Into ever mounting fury.
In the night they press upon me and through me--
I am drawn into their sphere--
See the universes with their eyes.
The wonders and horrors of infinite dimensions
Lie before my naked brain;
Flay my mind with each realization
That I am a blind animal
Cast upon a dust speck,
Insignificant in the totality that is beyond reason.
Then I am back in my yard,
The trees are black blobs against the night,
And all is still and hushed under an electric tension
That holds me captive
Until the trees are lost to sight.

The dark window and dark door appear black
Beneath twisted cedars bent like tortured men,
That twitch and dance in the growing dusk.
In a pool of lurking shadow, the shack
Squats and waits like a silent toad,
While glints of light shimmer in the liquid jet
Beyond its window panes and broken door.
Upon the sagging porch, piles of bones erode
Into pale grey dust the wind pushes away.
The breeze whispers balefully in the trees,
While the house, crouching like a vulture, groans
And with rabid hunger awaits its prey....

Beyond the grasslands dark, there rises grim
A palisade of mighty logs built high,
Of trees no man remembers or has seen,  
To bar all save great vultures soaring nigh.
It was built by Them long forgot and lost
In ages distant and interred in frost.
  
Though lost to memory, there lingers still
a screaming fear that stains the very soul
Of all that brave that bleak, titanic wall,
And sends them fleeing from their stated goal--
Or else vanished into the mist and fog
Like pebble cast into a weed-choked bog....
  
The timbers of which the vast wall was built--
Gargantuan logs with crowns sharp like thorns--
Are beyond the ken and reason of man;
Their presence a dark mystery that warns
Of things alien and prehistoric,
Unnameable, vast, phantasmagoric.

The great fence runs unbroken and severe--
Horizon to horizon it extends.
No fine crack or slight gap breaks its expanse,
And impassibility is all it portends;
And the mad, wind-tortured branches of the trees
Shriek like the winds of the lost, distant seas.
 
What lies beyond that barrier of spikes--     
A land of mist-shrouded glacier-bound peaks-- 
No man has discerned or lived to describe... 
The silent, frigid heights that no life seeks,     
Where the bleak glaciers grind on forever
In the wrack and the wrath of the weather.  
 
Beyond the vast mountains lies the Unknown,
A canvas to be filled with mysteries--
Nightmares and tales of the strange and malign,
And faceless, obscure hidden histories
Of beings and things not safe to reckon,
Lost in the cold with the whispers that beckon.
 
So the great Palisade has stood and stands,
Immune to the immortal claws of time--
A piece of the world as fixed as the sun,
That endures in the soul, dark and sublime,
Like the black forest of fear that laps at the mind,
And where good and evil dwell and are enshrined.