INTERIOR WORLDS

Many of our earliest terrors become embedded in our psyche. They are never entirely forgotten. I wonder whether some of them emerge again, in our final hours, from an imagined wardrobe's dark interior or, stealthily, from beneath the bed. 

BOGEYMAN

The thing that woke you nightly as a child,
that squatted in a corner and exhaled
foul promises,
returns in these last moments,
as your older self sinks down,
to mar the room’s sterility
with nauseating breath,
to whisper those familiar
obscenities again.

A WHALE OF A TIME (For Writers)

If you were born in August you share your birth month with a number of famous writers. 

Along with Herman Melville, author of Moby Dick, the list includes James Baldwin, Isabel Allende, Rupert Brooke, P D James, Leon Uris, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Guy de Maupassant, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Sara Teasdale, Izaak Walton, John Dryden, Philip Larkin, Jonathan Kellerman, Lawrence Binyon, Hugh MacDiarmid, Enid Blyton, Robert Southey, William Goldman, John Galsworthy, Sir Walter Scott, T E Lawrence, Stieg Larsson, Georgette Heyer, Ted Hughes, Ogden Nash, Jacqueline Susann, Robert Stone, E. Annie Proulx, Colm Tóibín, William Ernest Henley, Willy Russell, Robert Herrick, Jean Rhys, A.S. Byatt, Brian Moore, Sir John Buchan, Guillaume Apollinaire, Christopher Isherwood, Confucius, Theodore Dreiser, C.S. Forester, Ira Levin, Antonia Fraser, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Leo Tolstoy, Sir John Betjeman, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Preston Sturges, Thom Gunn, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and William Saroyan.
The list is not exhaustive by any means, tht's only the ones that write in, or have been translated into, English, but it gives you some idea of the wealth of literary talent born this month.