Haven’t done this in a while; figured it was time.

Storyteller’s Ghost

You come to the graveyard, like a traveler,
for rest: weary of your daily journeys, of
battles won and lost in classrooms and girls’ rooms
and the plastic chair behind your desk; you slip
through the gate unnoticed in the broad night, the
moon dripping heavy silver from the sky to your
skin, slippery, leaving you sleepy as you step,
carefully now, between the stones to your own
place of peace: a small bench of cool granite
nestled between my new home,
a tall tomb with a single keyhole, and
the green grass dotted with acorns and fallen
leaves, and soft patches, bearing messages
of what lies beneath. I am the faint voice
whispering between the stones, dipping into
your ear just as you get settled, with candle in hand
and book covering your bare boney knees like a blanket.
I am not at rest. I was a storyteller once, not
long ago, like you, before your young mind
learned language, before words flowed, when
backs were turned, from your own pen like
clear water from a porcelain glass. Come, stay,
I say, it’s your company I seek, with your candle
and lantern and head full of tales, gathered
between the cracks, in the dust, in battle, in dreams.
Fill my empty belly, rattling bells, hungry like earth.
Tell me one I haven’t heard before, the one I
could tell my children if they ever came, if they heard,
about pixie mischievous sprites that play tricks,
talking birds, hunters, owl moons and good mothers, or
perhaps what it’s like to sneak behind the neighbors’ house,
out to this lonely bone yard,
and how the world moves
with my body no longer in it.