In the hush where broken angels forget their names,
a cemetery exhales its stone-lunged hymns,
and the sky, bruised velvet, leans low—watching.

Between tilted crosses and time-eaten marble,
a black cat threads the silence like ink given legs,
tail curved like a question the world refuses to answer.

It pauses.

Not lost. Not found.
Simply appointed by night
to be its wandering punctuation.

The wind reads inscriptions no human remembers,
while shadows practice disappearing more politely.
Even the moon looks hesitant—
as if it learned grief too young.

The cat blinks once,
and the graves blink back.

Something ancient stirs beneath the mossed names,
not waking—only remembering it once had breath.

And above it all, the sky keeps pretending
it is only weather.


---

#GothicPhotography #BlackCat #CemeteryVibes #NoirAesthetic #DarkPoetry #MoodySky #NightWhispers #GraveyardArt #InkAndShadow #EtherealDark #StreetPhotographyMood #SilentTales
#cemetery
#decay
#365project

Chant of Fluorescent Streetlights

The bone brittle light
of old streetlights,
your half-burnt bulbs
sputtering blue death.

I’m comforted by the
constancy of loneliness
inflicted on me by
your incessant flickers.

Please, slay the day star
oh god of false light:
your phosphors are
still a pretense to me.

Your mission as always
has been to mock the
gentle moonlight and
the sun’s fulsome gaze!

#Artifice #DarkPoetry #Loneliness #SpeculativePoetry #Surrealism #Technology

Just You

I see myself standing alone,Where the incense fumes cease.My gaze averted to the ground,Away from pretty wreaths. I push my back against the wall,Exacting my revengeOn my spine for bringing me hereWhile you lay there, breathless. Flowers and ice all around you,Strange faces around me.Trapped in heaven's holy spotlight,I melt away slowly. They spoke of kindness in your wake,Virtues I never knew.I stood among their borrowed grief,Remembering just you.

https://davidjosephwriteshere.wordpress.com/2026/06/15/just-you/

A broken statue learns to stay,
where time has stripped its pride away.
The sky above, a muted cry,
watches stone refuse to die. 🗿🌫️



#GothicPhotography #FineArtPhotography #Statue #Decay #Ruins #AestheticDecay #DarkAesthetic #MoodyPhotography #AtmosphericPhotography #SkyPhotography #Clouds #CinematicPhotography #UrbanDecay #TimeWorn #StoneArt #AncientBeauty #Melancholy #VisualPoetry #DarkPoetry #ArtPhotography #SurrealMood #EternalSilence #NatureAndRuins 🌫️🗿🌌🕯️✨

Black and Blue Ribbons

Cupid’s dart through the heart,
by a sentence stealer who wrote
poetry with bruise hued ribbons,
shining signs and a lifetime supply
of bowties and harpsichord drums.

Weightless work in the sea, a
fighter and fisher, a hunter of
human flowers, focused on the sole
surprised survivors of daylight,
papered over with sharp delights
and black and blue ribbon rites.

#DarkPoetry #MagicalRealism #SpeculativePoetry #Surrealism #Uncertainty

In Capa Citation

this cold paralysisfreezing of mindbodysoulseizes meuntil every innervesselsqueezesshutthere is no sunwarm enoughexcepttimeandyetthe stuffof lifeconspirestoleave mebreathlessstrange toobserveIa frozen thingyet stillspinningincirclessomewherefar awaybeneathbittersnowIliewaitingfor thepainfulthaw

#bitterSnow #breathlessness #coldParalysis #ContemplativeWriting #DarkPoetry #emotionalNumbness #ExistentialPoetry #fragileHumanity #frozenHeart #frozenSoul #grief #hiddenPain #innerLandscape #innerWinter #Melancholy #mentalFreeze #mindBodySoul #modernLament #painfulThaw #poeticReflection #prosePoetry #psychologicalWinter #sacredMelancholy #spiritualDepression #spiritualStruggle #surrealArt #thawing #traumaAndHealing #waitingForThaw #winterImagery

Red Light Matter

Demons of daylight, spots
of dead Summer candy: skies
shimmer imperceptibly, with
a shambling incandescence.

Smoke stacks pushed up by
a star-shaped white staccato
beget a pure effulgence: one
red miracle to make all others. #DarkPoetry #Magic #Mortality #Mythology #Surrealism

The First Green Thorn

I returned
expecting only stone.

The same arch.
The same hollow.
The same bouquet
browned at the edges
like a prayer
left too long
in the weather.

I had learned
the discipline of kneeling.

I had learned
how to make peace
with the wrong place.

There is a strange holiness
in returning
to what cannot answer.

There is a strange faith
in speaking
to silence
until silence becomes
less empty.

But this morning,
at the foot of the cenotaph,
where the rain had gathered
in the crack
between two stones,

something had risen.

Not a flower.

Not yet.

Only a thorned green stem,
small enough
to be missed
by anyone
who came looking
for a miracle.

It leaned toward the light
with the awkward courage
of a thing
that had not been told
it was impossible.

I almost wept
from fear.

Grief I knew.
Absence I knew.
The old wound
had become a room
I could enter
without striking a match.

But life—
life arriving
without permission,
life answering
when I had stopped
asking,
life wearing thorns
before blossoms—

this was a more terrible mercy.

For if something grows here,
then I must change.

If the stone has cracked,
then I cannot spend forever
calling it final.

If roots have found me,
if green has entered
the vocabulary of my mourning,
then perhaps I have been wrong
about the dead.

Perhaps not all that is buried
is finished.

Perhaps not all that is empty
is abandoned.

Perhaps the former self
does not return
as the boy who believed,
but as the wound
that has learned
to shelter a seed.

I touched the stem
and blood rose
from my finger.

So this, too,
is resurrection:

not the absence of pain,
but pain made porous
to light.

Not the grave undone
all at once,
but a thorn
breaking through stone,

a small green alphabet
beginning again

where the epitaph
ran out of words.

The Cenotaph Triad

The Cenotaph

The Roots Beneath the Stone

The First Green Thorn

#Cenotaph #DarkArt #DarkPoetry #EmptyMonument #faithAndDoubt #FormerSelves #gothicIllustration #gothicPoetry #GreenStem #grief #Healing #hiddenLife #HopeInDarkness #innerLandscape #LifeAfterLoss #Melancholy #memory #Mercy #Mourning #poeticReflection #renewal #resurrectionImagery #roots #SpiritualReflection #StoneAndSeed #symbolicArt #TheFirstGreenThorn #Thorn

The Root Beneath the Stone

I thought the stone was final.

I thought the name carved there
was the last word
the earth would allow.

I thought absence
had a kind of authority,
as if an empty place
could speak with the voice of God
and say,
No farther.

But last night,
beneath the monument,
something moved.

Not the dead.
Not the lost.
Not the boy exactly,
nor the song,
nor the face before sorrow
taught it its new expression.

Something thinner than memory,
but stronger than grief.

A root.

Pale as a finger
beneath the dark soil,
blindly seeking
what the heart had forgotten
how to want.

It did not knock.
It did not rise
with trumpets or thunder.
It did not roll the stone away.

It only pressed
against the underside
of what I had mistaken
for an ending.

All these years
I had been kneeling
before emptiness,
bringing flowers
to a place
that could not receive them.

But perhaps the flowers knew
what I did not.

Perhaps their stems,
cut and dying,
were still fluent
in the old language of return.

Perhaps every grief
I laid down there
became compost.

Perhaps every tear
sank farther
than my prayers.

Perhaps the thing I mourned
was not buried elsewhere
after all,
but traveling underground,
passing through houses
that no longer stand,
fields grown over
with strange weeds,
the silence after a voice
has vanished.

I wanted resurrection
to arrive upright,
whole,
recognizable.

I wanted the former self
to come walking back
wearing the same face,
carrying the same bright belief,
singing the song
exactly as it was
before the world interrupted.

But roots do not return
as branches.

Seeds do not rise
as seeds.

What comes back
comes changed,
darkened by earth,
fed by what has fallen,
tender where it once was proud.

So I will come again
to the cenotaph.

I will bring flowers.

I will kneel.

But I will listen now
not for the dead
inside the stone,
not for the old name
to answer me,

but for the small green pressure
beneath everything,

the mercy
working in secret,

the hidden life
that does not ask
whether the grave was marked correctly,

only whether there is still
somewhere in me

a little soil

left open.

The Cenotaph Triad

The Cenotaph

The Roots Beneath the Stone

The First Green Thorn

#absence #Cenotaph #CreativeWriting #DarkArt #DarkPoetry #EmptyTomb #ExistentialPoetry #faithAndDoubt #FormerSelves #gothicIllustration #gothicPoetry #grief #HauntingBeauty #Healing #innerLandscape #LostJoy #Melancholy #memory #Mercy #Mourning #poeticReflection #resurrectionImagery #roots #SpiritualReflection #symbolicArt #TheRootBeneathTheStone

Proclivities

Abandon reality
before attempting
to breathe a single
breath, as your death
supersedes sincerity.

Excavations into
machinations that
sometimes fail to
please, oh please
play nicely do.

Can you believe a
thing without the
requisite inoculations
from fear, to prevent
any fear, my dear.

Terrain of planets
whose dimensions
crack reality in half
with deliberate intent
reveal our pretentions.

Don’t believe anything
without the mandatory
indoctrinations that
solidify a fear of fears:
O dear, my dear.

#DarkPoetry #Depression #MentalHealth #Philosophy