Providence, his dark bayside muse,
lent itself well to his humors.
He saw potential lovers everywhere,
in the same dank nooks and holes
where potential horrors would be found.

He did not in real life love much or well.
In the long run he did not scare
much either, or trust the devotion
of his monsters to their creator;
in the long run, he only kept the city

as full companion and partner. He was born
here, left and returned, eventually died
muttering about the pain in his gut and
the Elder Race in his dreams, settling at last
on one phrase to capture all his attention:

“Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.”
In his house at R’lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.
Think of it: a man so in love with darkness he had to create
new words to chant it free of the depths it occupied
within him, the depths he sensed were present in traces

in the alleys behind the grand homes
of Angell Street, Waterman Street, Benefit Street;
in the drowned eyes that sought him out when he stared into
the rivers that emptied black here from the New England hills.
New words for something at once terrible and inescapable —

something like love, at least to him.