“When H. P. Lovecraft met Edgar Allen Poe”

In a parlor draped in shadow, where the velvet curtains fall,  
Two figures cloaked in midnight met within the candle’s thrall.  
By ticking gloom and fluttered moth, in Providence’s years gone cold,  
H. P. Lovecraft sought the ghost of Poe, whose terrors had grown old.

The moonlight spilled like silver ink across the ancient desk,  
As Lovecraft bowed, his granite eyes both courteous and grotesque.  
“Good sir,” he whispered, haunted calm, “I’ve read your tales of dread;  
The Raven’s wing—like cosmic void—still circles in my head.”

Poe, ephemeral in his frock, regarded this pale guest—  
“Your Old Ones dwell in chasms deep, where logic comes to rest.  
I wove my fears from beating hearts and veils of mourning woe,  
Yet you have spun from starlit dark the terror I now know.”

They traded secrets, subtle, strange, with ink upon the air:  
The crypt’s cold stone, the pit’s descent, the eldritch who despair.  
Poe smiled thin: “In Montresor’s toast, and Usher’s final night,  
Madness wore a human mask and death was dressed in white.”

Lovecraft’s hand shook on the page, “Yet see, beyond the firmament,  
My terror grows in formless shapes—no solace, no lament.  
Your catacombs are fit for men; my cosmos gives no heed—  
It’s not Revenge, but cosmic Chance, that makes the whole world bleed.”

The lamplight guttered; somewhere near, a raven gave a cry—  
Two voices, joined across the years, beneath a starless sky.  
Great masters of the fearful art, who mapped the haunted soul—  
In silence parted, each returned to night’s unending shoal.

And somewhere, deep in dream or mist, when midnight bells intone,  
A shadow falls where Poe once walked and Lovecraft stands alone.  
Yet in that dusk their visions meet—an endless, spectral tide:  
Where horror finds its many forms, and wonder walks beside.

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