*
//=\\

Twins in the doorway
faces for names,
masks cover meanings
sly and insane
with feelings for features
and pinpricks for eyes
the blindess that masquerades
the telling of lies;


--one runs up before you to show what she's found

but the other one will kill you if you don't turn around--

--the happiness stamped onto one's painted face

melts into derision as the other takes her place--


splitting persona,
a dichotomy of you,
now you're confused as to what you should do:
break through the window or call-in the crime?
the heart on the sleeve or a sly pantomime?
consider the prose or descend into rhyme?
slam down the phone or stay on the line?


you must decide if the decision is yours,
you have to choose if you've any recourse,
to madness that's mindless or passion with pain,
subordinate kindness or tears in the rain.


i cannot tell, i cannot say,
it isn't for me to get in your way,
to ask you to work or beg you to play,
or remind you of who you were yesterday,
you mold your thoughts and they harden like clay:

So just who will you be today?

E.F. Bensen, a late-19th-to-early-20th-century horror writer, wrote a short story called "How Fear Left the Gallery," about a pair of ghostly twins whose appearance in the doorway of a certain room in a certain house forebode hideous death. The twins had been murdered by their uncle, who had killed their father and married their mother for wealth.

Possibly the scariest thing in the classic horror movie, The Shining. Those twins with blue dresses and blank faces who appear standing still in the long hallways and in the doorways of that house haunted me when I closed my eyes for a long time after watching that flick.