by Richard Gavin
Artwork By S.R.Greenfield

Lacking funds and artistic inspiration, the poet took up residence in a tenement in a grey-shaded district of the city. He hoped the grim lodging would provide him with fresh ideas.

After what might have been several weeks or several hours (the poet would find himself unable to recall such details in later years) a muse sought fit to visit his hovel. It assumed the form of disembodied voices that came echoing up through the large furnace vent in the floor.

The poet was unsure how to best express the ideas he was privy to, for the whispered musings were far more horrific than his usual material. But true inspiration emerges only a handful of times in an artist’s life, so the poet milked the opportunity.

Pre-dawn hours were spent hunched atop his furnace vent, notebook in hand, transcribing morbid images of agony and loss.

One night the muse-voices vanished, but it no longer mattered. The poet had completed his book-length poem; Pain-Muse.

After the publishing contract, the literary awards, the government grants, and the acclaim, the poet learned that he could not in all good conscience take full credit for Pain-Muse.

The newspapers told of a grisly discovery the police had recently made in the basement of an old tenement. The bodies of a woman and her two daughters had been found inside the wall of the building’s furnace room. Their estimated time of death coincided with the poet’s residency.

The building’s superintendent had been arrested. There was irrefutable evidence linking him to the abominable crime.

Upon discovering this, naturally the poet slipped into a deep depression. For an artist, there is nothing more damaging than performing unconscious plagiarism; unwittingly taking credit for another man’s work. His thoughts drifted back to those nights beside the furnace vent. In his mind he once more heard the woman pleading for him to seek help. He could almost hear the daughters whimpering. For so long he’d imagined those pleas were for his own delight; a personalized gift from the nether-region. But in the end he was a scribe to another man’s madness.

The poet’s depression began to recede once he figured out a way to redeem the error of Pain-Muse.

His recent wealth had enabled him to purchase a small house in the countryside, a sanctuary that was free of any unwanted influence.

That night the poet prepared his cellar with shackles and blackened windows before he went out to stalk the streets.

The grim imagery in his next opus would be solely his creation.