Our Dearest Readers,

We have an important question for you. It’s so important that we must lean close and ask it in hushed tones. You’d best lean in too, lest you miss it! Ready?

BOO!

Okay, are you scared now? Yes? Now you know how we felt. We were so scared when we saw how many amazing submissions there were for the previous instalment of Open-Source Poetry! How on earth were we going to pick just one to add to this new lyrical masterpiece? It wasn’t going to be easy.

So, after a great many incantations over blood-soaked prayer beads ripped from the entrails of a satanically depressed gerbil, we eventually settled on Munira Ezzi’s sparkling contribution. Well… we’re kidding, of course. How could we rely on silly bloody incantations? Only a coin toss would do. (Although we do find it rather strange that the results matched.) Anyway, her lines felt like such a logical progression from what had gone before, so we ended up agreeing with the aforementioned incantations and coin toss outcome. How could we not use her contribution?

Now, if you would like us to agonise over your contributions for the next part of this poem in a similar fashion, we suggest you pay attention to the following rules:

1) Read the current version of this communal poetic effort below, and marvel at how scarily good it is (or is that goodily scary?). Then submit your own line or two for our consideration.
2) If we like your line (or two) the best, we’ll add it to the poem, then we’ll publish said result in a follow-up post.
3) Then you keep submitting frightening wordage aplenty in an attempt to chill us to the bone some more!
4) And so the whole process of submission and rejection is repeated until we finally have a horrifying new masterpiece!

PS: For those who may still be recovering from their New Years hangover, we remind them of the topic to the poem… It’s in the style of a good ol’ horror movie!