H.P. In Love

Originally posted 8/29/2013.

Providence, dark bayside muse,
lent itself well to his humors.
He glimpsed potential lovers
in the same pits and holes
where potential horrors could be found.

He did not in real life love much or well.
He did not trust others, carried dank biases too far,
mistrusted at last even the devotion 
of his own 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 intention:

“Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.”
In his house at R’lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.
Think of the man unveiled there:
one so soaked with darkness he had to squeeze out
new words for those depths within him,

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

something, at least to him, very much like love.