The Cove

A flaying of the mind

Adam Ray Cronk
1 min readOct 29, 2023

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Photo by Quaid Lagan on Unsplash

Beyond the coves and bays and sounds,
a thick’ning fog casts ships aground,
whereupon the rock, crashing waters break,
and leaves the souls for brine to take.
The midnight hours are sick’ning dark,
heaving ghastly glowing sparks;
birthing foetid remnants of space,
and incomprehensible remains.
In early light, the ire rests,
while slowly leaching pestilence;
infecting lifeblood and its hosts
who bathe in pools of cosmic repose.
The scale and slime and unpleasant to touch,
and beings of fins and gills and such,
unrecogniz’d now in pitiful state,
begetting new fears to contemplate.
The skin convuls’d in erratic ways
before flaying off in wretch’d decay.
Bones bent to shape new gruesome forms —
the unholiest wrought, from grotesque borne.
Scores of eyes glance all peripheries,
but not the mind to process what it sees.
The gills are shunt’d and disregard what is left,
while the flesh still writhes long after death.
They consum’d that flesh and soon did find
a loss beyond the body and mind —
to understand is to know the less and less,
cognizance lost in a mind regress’d.

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Adam Ray Cronk

Poet & short story writer, lover of eldritch horror and anything Poe or Lovecraft | My writing ebbs and flows, from dark to light and back again.