The Crypt Keeper’s Carnival

Dewy dusk descends on carnival grounds,
Veiled in velvet skirts of twilight and blinking nebulae,
A pantheon of gnarled oaks guard the way,
Murmuring secrets in owl hoots and cricket strings.

Yet, through the foggy maws of the Terrestrial, strolls the Curious,
Children of men seeking mirth in the Mystery’s womb,
Unaware of the spectral silhouettes that dance in the lantern’s sickly glow.
And so begins the carnival of craven dreams, beneath the abhorrent moon’s leer.

Abruptly, the laughter drowns in the silence of dread,
A stifling stillness greets, uninviting as the Reaper’s grin,
As the carousel scorns its former merriment,
Blossoming into a wraith-like fiend of garish horses and dissonant dirge.

Intrepid souls venture into a hall of mirrors,
Only to find staring back not their visage, but their Monsters,
Fed by the marrow of guilt, anguish and fear,
Now freed from the dungeons of forgotten dismay, to leer and sneer.

In the shadow of monstrous ferris wheel,
A Timorous mortal to the puppet show is drawn,
Wherein the protagonist, is but his desolate reflection,
Enacted by grotesque marionettes masked with his failures, in stark retaliation.

Ephemeral shrouds of cotton candy turn to cobwebs on the tongue,
Each lick a cruel manifestation of regrets sprung,
Once sanguine sweetness, now bitter decay,
Just as promised joy festers into dismay.

A scream shatters the dirge, echoed by the silent moon,
From the dark depths of the carnival, cries doomed,
When gaiety’s veneer begins to crumble, the crypt reveals its face,
A twisted tableau of painted horrors, in the guise of innocent place.

Escaping into the shadowed maw of night, leaving laughter’s hollow shell,
A procession of tormented spirits, whispers tales of the carnival spell,
Yet, despite the harrowing ordeal, the hours drawn with fright’s ink,
A bitter taste of truth is realized, as into their own darkness, they sink.

For the Carnival was but a mirror, a reflection raw and dire,
Of the shadow circus that within us transpires,
Behold, The Crypt Keeper’s Carnival, a voyeur of your despairs,
Where in the colors of the night, each must face their dreaded fears.