Woe to the man
Alone in the evening
With a fear of the darkness
And a heart that does thunder⠀
Startling terror
Upon a knock at the door
“Who at this hour?”
He can only wonder⠀
Deep is his impending dread
Of spirits and goblins
Bumps in the night
And things that do prowl⠀
Ghosts and banshees
Lurk around every corner
Wolves in the mountains
With their ominous howls
©️2026 Kevin Trent Boswell
Author’s Note: I have always written very quickly. In my early twenties, I worked for a while in a textile mill in South Carolina. I mentioned to a coworker named Herbert how fast I write.
He asked what kind of material I was capable of writing, and I said (perhaps arrogantly) “Anything you want.”
He smiled and said “Can you write me something about ghosts?” About ten or twenty minutes later, I returned with “Herbert’s Ghosts” in my notebook. He was pretty impressed.
He knew that I had written it because he could see me writing in my notebook with a pen from his spot on the floor. And he knew I hadn’t used AI or the internet for help, because this was during the pre-internet era.
That was back when dinosaurs still roamed the earth, but they were just itty-bitty baby dinosaurs; it was that long ago.
From the book Dark Matter – Poems of Horror and Depravity
