Hawthorne has touched my heart.
His hand grasping a pen,
Has reached through ghostly centuries to find it's way to me,
And sketch upon my minds eye
The dark and crooked visage of one Chillingworth,
So that he stands at my bedside,
A psychotic and malevolent smile,
Glowing white on the black backdrop of my eyelids,
A swirl of his cloak stirring the fine print from which he rose,
a phoenix.
So haunted in this dark night,
I am connected to centuries past,
The mind that first bore this terror,
And from it wrought a devil to chase down dreams and with savor twist the knife deeper into our hearts,
To bleed,
If only on the page.