YWA's Writing Contest

Where Nightmare’s Reign

 

What if you couldn't tell what was real?

And tangible things had no feel,

But use reality's blinds to conceal...

 

Your sister suddenly disappears –

No-one saw a single thing –

But you find her dress and bloodied shears.

 

You walk through a garden of flowers,

And slip into sinking sand –

An unseen hole where you fall for hours.

 

Your family dog, a lifelong friend,

Transforms into a rabid wolf.

You're forced to kill it; not pretend.

 

Then you awake, and all is back,

but you have an awkward feeling,

since you're tied to a railroad track.

 

As the engine closes in,

You flee at full speed, and look behind

To see the devil with a morbid grin.

 

You trip over a corpse and scream

and struggle away from the evil

to find yourself in bed, a dream.

 

Daring yourself to awake,

You step into the familiar hall,

and everything begins to shake.

 

The house splits into two

And a trench opens beneath, falling,

the heat increases to burn you.

 

Fire licks and teeth bite both your feet

You cannot escape no-matter

how you shake and tear the bed sheet.

 

Back out on the lamp-lit street,

Where jack-o-lanterns smile in the dark,

You go door-to-door to trick-or-treat.

 

Not knowing what they put inside

the candy bits, you bite one open,

and poison seeps in like a tide.

 

It crashes over you: drowned.

Pulling you under: suffocation.

Until you cannot hear a sound.

 

Screams erupt with a sounding boom,

And you throw yourself to dry ground,

Discovering a zombie-filled tomb.

 

Undead attack of all size and shape.

You run along car-infested streets

And realize it's all real: No escape.

 

If no chills have run from your brain,

Know that you're probably insane,

And can't see the place where nightmares reign.

 

 

 

I wrote this poem for the “Young Writers Association’s Scary Writing Contest”. I had to write something scary, but not gory in 300 words or less. I started by writing a couple short stories, but soon found that my writing was strange and weird, not scary. So, I decided to try another approach. I wrote this poem, aiming more for creepy, rather than scary, but hoped it would give chills. Reading the poem now, it still doesn’t quite accomplish that unless you think about what the underlying idea is…

 

When I began writing this, I decided to make as many three line stanzas as would amount to 300 words, with the last words of the 1^st and 3^rd lines in each stanza rhyming. (I later changed the format for the first and final stanzas so that all three lines rhyme. I thought it added an extra flourish and sounded cool too.) I ended up with 16 stanzas, but my simple structure didn't quite fit what I wanted.

 

After about 5 stanzas, I saw that I had only succeeded in writing somewhat random creepy thoughts, but the stanzas had no links to each other. Re-reading the few that I had, I realized that I could link each stanza to the next, simply by putting an idea at the end of one, which I continued into the next.

 

For example: the “shears” at the end of the 2^nd would be used in the “garden” of the 3^rd. The “hole” in the 3^rd could have been made by the “dog” in the 4^th. “Pretend” in the 4^th contrasts sharply with the “awake”-ning from a dream in the 5^th, etc.

 

At the point when I was working on the 14th stanza, I decided I needed to re-evaluate what the point of my poem was. Could it be more than a collection of creepy incidents? So starting around stanza 14, the lines became more complicated.

 

Stanza 14 continues from 13 as if the flood carried you under water and threw you up into a deserted cavern, which reveals itself as a “tomb”. The tomb comes to life in 15, since they are almost always filled with “undead” anyway. 15 then reveals that it really was all to real-life, everyone in the world is dead (or undead), and there is “no escape” from that life… a true nightmare.

 

My poem was finished. If anyone read the poem for what it was truelly saying, they would see past the semi-random incidents and see the deeper point. I knew that the poem wasn’t necessarily scary by itself, so maybe it wouldn’t cause “chills”, but I told my readers that if they could “see” what our world for what it really is (with all its horrible problems as exagerated in the body of the poem), they would come to realize that we live in a place “where nightmares reign”.

 

Once that was discovered, we must ask ourselves, is this all life is? "Reality's blinds" might decieve us for a little while so that we cannot see what our lives are, but unless we're insane we can't go through life without asking, "is there nothing more?" This poem is meant to inspire that question, the answer to which should make us embrace our broken world all the more.