WRIT OF THE DEAD POET

Death came for me on the eve of my good fortune. not out of malice or benevolence, but swiftly, as if I had been chosen. These are the words that lie in shadow. I am in shadow. -Ebon Croe

WINNER https://www.neopoet.com/workshop/poems/writ-dead-poet

WRIT OF THE DEAD POET

Death came for me on the eve of my good fortune, emissary of my shadowed writ, finding the ink still warm with blood yet denying me the hour I was owed. Life grants only the privilege of passing, swiftly, without malice or mercy, as if I had been chosen.

Chosen by the rival poet who seethed beneath the shadow‑borne temptation of my fate.

Shot through the skull, I scrawled, in fevered haste, the rage of my assassin’s name at the end of my crowning opus, sealing his doom in the blood of my final breath, granting him the fame that damned him, Murder, by his hands, or mine?

But Death had its own writ for my deliverance: to bury me in the mind of this madman. I rose not in flesh but in the margins of his fame, an anguished tremor in his quill hand with every stolen breath, the revenant author of the poem he defiled. His name, written as if in victory, bled into the curse beneath his shadowward path; every praise he gathered, steeped in usurpation, forged the shadow of my return.

In the nights that followed, my words tormented him like a crown of thorns twisting truth through his mind. His quill trembled; the ink recoiled. My voice threaded through his nightmares like a tightening stitch, until he could no longer tell whether the poem was writing him, or writing me.

At last, he shattered, and my final words rose through the paper:

God, I died this night, bearing witness to the devil’s delight.

When they found his body, fingers curled around the cold pages of my shadow‑wrought opus, the ink had blackened, yet beneath it,

death’s signature lay, Ebon Croe.