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.

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

Excellent edit. :-)