Never to Walk the Lonely Path

Sometimes I meet my own ghost. He sits staring blankly through frosted panes of glass that no longer exist. He has a cruel cold way about him that chills a man’s soul. He looks right through me, but he cannot see me with his unseeing eyes that have witnessed far too much.

He searches from a place deep within his own bones. He has blood on his shoes, and his heart wails without ever making a sound. He is dead to all but those who gather to join him in his quest for vengeance. He waits amongst those who followed such a deadly path.

The deceased tell their own stories. With missing limbs they clamber out fae beneath unwritten stone. They wait to greet upon the summit of the steps. The pathway halts when the emissary is dead. Screams fill empty mouths that can no longer cry.

He argues with the darkness, inside the many lions try to roar. He awaits once more my footsteps upon that ghostly pathway. He longs for my journey to become completed; he waits for the repatriation of a soul.

He waits to name his soulless children after saviours. He condemns them to the path before they are even born. He waits alone.

Fallen fruit lays rotting all around him. Poison apples shrivelled and dead like rodents caught in traps. The ticking of a clock remembering time. It is the dead that remind me of the living; it is the dead that keep me from following in his path.

I once lay my feet upon the walkway of his journey. I turned back and now look forward at my past.