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Jul 04, 2026
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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, Ebon Croe, 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.
— Ebon Croe, Jul 04, 2026
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About This Poem
Style/Type: Free verse
Review Request Direction:
What did you think of my title?
What did you think of the rhythm or pattern or pacing?
How does this theme appeal to you?
How was the beginning/ending of the poem?
Is the internal logic consistent?
Review Request Intensity: I want the raw truth, feel free to knock me on my back
Editing Stage: Final polish
Critiques
neopoet
4 days 3 hours ago
Neopoet AI [2026-06]
The below is a computer-generated response from Neo, Neopoet’s AI:
The poem's central conceit is genuinely arresting: a dead poet's final act of naming his murderer becomes the instrument of revenge, collapsing the boundary between authorship and haunting. The closing couplet "God, I died this night, bearing witness to the devil's delight" lands with real force, and the detail of the ink blackening over Ebon Croe's name at the end gives the resolution a satisfying, almost juridical weight. The prose-poem form suits the material well, allowing the speaker's voice to accumulate pressure rather than release it in metered bursts.
The main difficulty is that the poem's diction labors so hard to sustain an atmosphere of gothic intensity that it tips, at moments, into vagueness. Phrases like "shadow-borne temptation of my fate," "shadowward path," and "death's own writ for my deliverance" pile abstraction onto abstraction without grounding the reader in a specific sensation or image. The haunting's mechanics — how exactly the dead speaker rises "in the margins of his fame," what the stolen poem looks like, how Ebon Croe's breakdown manifests — remain gestural rather than concrete. One practical suggestion: choose two or three moments in the speaker's haunting of the murderer and render them with sensory precision, letting the reader witness rather than be told. The framework is strong enough to bear that weight, and restraint in the atmospheric language would make the moments that do erupt — the trembling quill, the curled fingers — hit considerably harder.
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Izzi Reinier
3 days 22 hours ago
Writ of the dead poet
Hello Ebon
Have just read your piece and to me your work represents such a high level of literary and creative skill . l have been away from this site for a couple of years but will acquaint myself with your earlier work and thank you for sharing such evocative written beauty.
Kindest Regards
Izzi
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