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    The 13th Cusp
    The 13th Cusp
    The 13th Cusp
    Ebook92 pages46 minutes

    The 13th Cusp

    By Candice James

    ()

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    About this ebook

    A collection of dark poems by Candice James, Poet Laureate Emerita, New Westminster, BC CANADA, running the gamut from simple horror to choke-holds on the mind and travels through the inner sanctum

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSilver Bow Publishing
    Release dateOct 19, 2017
    ISBN9781927616611
    The 13th Cusp

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      Book preview

      The 13th Cusp - Candice James

      Thirteenth Cusp

      By Candice James

      Smashwords Edition 2017

      License Notes

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not

      be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book

      with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If

      you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for

      your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own

      copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author

      Copyright © 2017 Silver Bow Publishing

      978-1-927616-61-1 (e-book)

      Silver Bow Publishing

      The most frightening thing in life

      is the possibility of no afterlife

      ~ Candice James

      Acknowledgements

      My journey through the universal poetic community has been a walk to recall with passion, joy and learning. And, as always, I thank my mentor, the late Fred Cogswell (1917-2004), Founder of Fiddlehead Poetry Books (which morphed into Goose Lane Editions) and Officer of the Order of Canada for his encouragement and belief in my poetic abilities back in the very early days in the 1970’s. Without his encouragement and help I may never have continued writing poetry and this book may not have come to be. Thank-you Fred, wherever you are.

      Table of Contents

      13th Cusp

      Exorcism

      A Drop of Red Blood

      A Murder of Crows

      Broken Zipper

      Burying the Dead

      Comes a Poet Darkly

      Crack in the Mirror

      Crumbling Prison

      Death Rattle

      Eerie Shadowlands

      Escape

      Eyelid of the World

      Further from the Light

      Leaving the Past Behind

      Ghostly Tryst

      Memphis Andromanya (epic poem)

      Dickwad Headcase

      Giggle Damned

      Hawk

      Mind Maze

      Hollow Moon

      Human Crush

      I Succumb

      Princess of the Tower

      It’s Complicated

      Net of Delusion

      Oblique

      Perdition’s Prophecy

      The Ladder

      Phantoms

      Prematurely Dead

      Riding Styx River

      Psychosis

      Sadomasochistic Reveries

      The Piano’s Waxed Ebony Face

      Secret Shade

      Transience

      Shadow People

      Sharma Lon

      Stale Blade Scar of Life

      Ashmodai Garden

      Street of Long Shadows

      The Devil’s Loom

      Ashmodai Mirrors

      The Empty Women

      The Horseman and the Witch

      The Depth of Her Fall

      The Price of a Bullet

      The Room

      The Whistler

      This Return

      To the Black of Night

      Tombstones

      Voices

      Walking Dead

      Lost Angel

      Wounded Elegy

      Wraith Demons

      The Lost

      Coming Undone

      Poet Profile

      13th Cusp

      At the edge of the 13th cusp’s bag of tricks

      I cling to the shore of the River Styx.

      Barbed wire bony fingers claw flesh from my soul.

      The edge of night lingers as dark as black coal

      inside this painting of hellish perdition.

      There’s nowhere to end and no place to begin

      begging for contrition in a galaxy too far.

      I smell ancient battle, and the blood on a scar

      in the damp cicatrix of this apocalypse

      pronounced dead on arrival spewed blood drips from lips.

      Hanging on the razor’s edge of stale breath bated

      rancid meat’s flayed for Satan’s hunger to be sated!

      Horned ravens suckle on death's fetid breath;

      in red-hot lava, burnt flesh and creeping death.

      Riveted and writhing in a dark bat-winged curtain,

      the blind clutch the blind, shaken, fearful and uncertain,

      tearing out their eyeballs in fear of second sight,

      stumbling on dismembered limbs at the edge of midnight,

      lost in this darkness, these emaciated foes

      as Lucifer swallows their soul’s fleeing shadows.

      On the 13th cusp, I stand balanced perfectly

      as death’s delivery table rebirths reality.

      Cloaked in superstitions and mired in dark fears

      I become the clotted blood of invisible tears,

      My heartbeat is failing. The saber has been thrust.

      Bleeding out in blackest night, I am the 13th cusp.  

      Exorcism

      Angel,

      you broke the twilight

      into

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