“A poem in the style of Edgar Allan Poe, like The Raven and The Bells, about a cricket in the room where my wife and I watch television that keeps ticking, ticking, ticking.”

Once upon a midnight weary, in the flicker, dim and eerie,  
In the room where shadowed silence met the blue-lit screen’s soft bloom,  
As my wife and I lay nested, all our patience sorely tested—  
From the hush, a sound infested every corner of the room—  
A relentless, restless ticking—not a whisper, nor a boom—  
‘Twas a cricket’s quiet doom.

Every second, every minute, grew a rhythm dark within it,  
With a ticking like a metronome that measures out our gloom.  
On the carpet, in the ceiling, on the walls—it kept revealing  
Its persistence, its appealing for dominion of the room—  
A tireless, tragic ticking, rising from the twilight’s tomb—  
Ringing secrets of our room.

Oh, how faintly did it wander, as we pondered, ever fonder,  
All the scenes upon the glowing glass that painted up the gloom.  
But the plot was lost and shivered, for our focus strangely withered—  
By the measuring, mystic ticking that vibrated through the room—  
A reminder, unrelenting, of some unseen cricket’s loom—  
Never resting in our room.

Said my wife, with silence sighing, “Can you find it?—Oh, I’m trying—  
But it slips from lamp to shadow, unobserved by any broom!”  
Round the corners, through the plaster, in a torment ever vaster,  
Did the ticking mark disaster—was it coming for our doom?  
Or to taunt us with a ticking, like a metronome of doom—  
Endless echo in the room.

Now the television’s faces glimmer with infernal traces,  
While that cricket’s ancient patience knits a spell within the gloom.  
Ever ticking, ever clicking, ever victoriously picking—  
At the edges of our senses, drumming through the empty room—  
Till we’re lost, and softly sleeping, in the cricket-haunted room—  
Never silent… never bloom.

Create Your Own Poem | Recent Poems