The Poetry of Michael Eugene Cantrall

Ghost House

Ghost House, my ghost house
The antique relic calls to me

This darkness sleeps within
Shadows not so far away

The unending echoes of ringing bells
Toll the knell for a mortal clock below

I’m hiding from a long and lonely dwell
Though I know forever it waits for me

A haunted heart within eternal dark
Feels a ghost house waiting quietly

I can see you in this place I stay
I can see you almost every day

I can see you when you scan your eyes
I can see you, and you’re my disguise

I can see you in reverse this way
I can see you backwards when you stray

I sense shadows on my wall in the dark
looking glass that cloaks the secret things
as another slips through the door opened
in the ghost house of the lonely dweller

The lure of soft purple incense calls me
to the one awakened from the long sleep
while learning to leave the world of chaos
where sad things melt into useful nothings

My darkling glass before my deeply sinking darkness
my background continues to whisper blurs
in the shadows of the shell of myself
as I peer into your eyes on this eve

What sayeth my oracle?

No power can stop or slow the slide
Or reverse the flow of this aging tide

Of yesterday, there be no more
And tomorrow’s on a distant shore

To rue the day of any passed
May be a wish to be the last

Dear muse, please do, please stay
Please never go away
When I sense a crack in my roof
your words arrive as absinthe rains
dancing through my empty pages

All images of daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, tintypes, cabinet cards, and postcards are from the author’s private collection. Photographs appearing on this writer’s pages on this site are licensed.

The lyrics for this poem, Ghost House (version 2), are drawn from fragments of seven of my previous poems, also posted on All Poetry, as follows:

1. Ghost House (December 2024)
2. To Me From You (January 2025)
3. Mirror, Mirror (January 2025)
4. Lines Composed Before a Scrying Mirror (Nov. 2024)
5. To rue the day (October 2024)
6. Ghost Mirror (September 2023)
7. To feel the rain (Feb. 2022)

I have also produced this as a song & music video
posted on YouTube (see below).

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