Dancing With the Dead

Not sure if it's a poem. If it looks like a poem and smells like a poem, then it is a poem. Need to ask somebody like fatboy (or Ewan) they instinctively see the patterns others miss.

Hi S00z006,

I think this is definitely a poem, a fantasy poem,
I could imagine her dancing in the graveyard, I
could really see it. Great one.

Jenny.

It feels like a poem to me, hits a lot of poetic buttons - Very dark this sooz, reminds me a bit of the Danse Macabre of Saint-Saens.

'She lifts a shiny white knee and her foot toes flat and fleshlessly spaced'

That's poetry isn't it? Thanks for the read. :-)

Sooz, I really liked this, so please, please don't bin it.

It is indeed a great poem and have taken the liberty of setting it out to its full advantage. Hope you didn't mind, only I really was so taken with it. It is bursting full of imagery and atmosphere, of course, but also internal rhymes, which I really do admire. Anyway, here goes.

Let me out on a moonlit night
and I’ll dance with the dead.
She pours from her grave
and swathes the shore
and the cast of her steps
leaves no print in the sand
or taint of her ever having been.

I’ll embrace her torment
and tango the fandango in the surf
and polka through moonbeams
with her corpse, feather-light
in my arms. Her tendrils of hair
hanging sparse from the bone
of the dome of her skull...

Limey soil pompadour smell
of mulch; the earth more alive
than I am. Flaps of desiccate flesh
adhere to the contours and craters
of facial formation; the sockets
near empty bar from the rim
which is milky with eye-juice
pooling and curling for the feasting
of maggots and of worms.

Her smile is of bone and the skill
of her dentist low-lit by glistening jaw.
There we waltz through the night
to the deathly music, a symphonic
dirge of her life. Her life, my life,
her direct descendent. So we dance
on the sand in the moonlight.

Her womb as dissolved; her space,
my place where I belonged. Pelvis
to pelvis, breast bone to flesh,
her death-grown nails darkened talons
as she holds me against her once more,
indenting the skin of my shoulder,
while from hers...hangs a tatter of cloth
from her drowned-in dress.

My hand in hers, as cold as the grave,
while hers feels of nothing but fingers.
She lifts a shiny, white knee and her foot
toes flat and fleshlessly spaced, and
we gavotte, as we dance, as we dance,
as we dance.

Ha, brilliant. I'll need to get you to do that with my stories.

;-)

I really like it, and I think Tina's line breaks make it so much easier to read and gives it huge impact, it's weird but strangely compelling.

Thanks all for the comments and especially to Tina for sorting out my rambled mess, greatly appreciated.

You wrote a great poem, there, Sooz. Glad to be of help;-)

Excellent edit. :-)