“The Alleyman” by Silvatiicus Riddle

Silvatiicus Riddle

The Alleyman

He stands in the back row, spiderweb of nightbirds sewn together with the strings of all that hurts; black obelisk in a discarded trench coat, throwing flashes of white-zirconia solar flares with every wink, unseen behind an audience of two hundred. He remains, a shadow under house lights, fills the room with the soil-dark tapestry of his many-feathered form as they dim. I stumble through my lines, my reading, myself becoming an incomprehensible poem borne in sweat, under the burn of the lunar spotlight before the world, or, so it seems. It is him, it is him, it is him, it is him, taken up in the heat of his arms and swept around the creaking silence. I close my eyes, watch the revolutions of our spiral from inside my skull, and I know, I know, the perfect fire of his night vision sees me, through me—a small thing, silhouette, barely sketched against the back of my eyelids. I lean in, the wisp of a prayer to honor his presence—archetype of sadness—the shivering nest of his body, and the world dissolves with me.

I find myself outside, back-alley, diffused daylight stinging my eyes in the overcast. A dying bulb flickers in a doorway. A man in a trench coat watches from the fire-escape, from beside a trash-heap, from behind a streetlight. He is a stranger, yet somehow familiar. I push past him as he draws near, finding that old familiar gait beneath my boots, I puddle-tread while the weather breaks, eye trained on the greening rowhouses where roads diverge. A low chitter, stifled crow, a paroxysm of birds taking flight. I turn, look over my shoulder. Errant pages of a newspaper gathered up by a breeze, tail of a tabby cat, steam rising from the busy streets beyond.

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Silvatiicus Riddle (He/They) is a 7x Rhysling Award-nominated Dark Fantasy/Speculative Fiction Writer & Poet haunting the bones of an old amusement park on the edge of New York City. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in: Strange Horizons, Apex Magazine, Enchanted Living, Eternal Haunted Summer, Spectral Realms, and Creepy Podcast, among others. He combats despair and entropy with his newsletter, The Goblin’s Reliquary. For all available works, please visit: http://linktr.ee/silvatiicusriddle

Author’s Backstory/Crafting Elements: I am someone that has dealt with depressive episodes for most of my life, and this poem is an exploration of the incessant and overwhelming presence that depression can have, its largeness, its all-encompassing, dizzying nature. Depression consumes you, whirls you around in familiar patterns, all while you are expected to perform wellness for the world. I also explore the sudden and unexpected breaks from the weighted sadness, but the sense, even then, that still there is something terrible lurking behind, its eyes always upon you, waiting for the next moment to strike once again.

Editor’s Comments/Image Credit: Abstract portrait of a person with a mental disorder (image by magnific/freepik)