Books Reading the Weird The Same Thing I Do Every Night: Poetry by Maxwell Gold Like the Weird itself, poetry can be hard to define… By Ruthanna Emrys, Anne M. Pillsworth | Published on April 8, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share Welcome back to Reading the Weird, in which we get girl cooties all over weird fiction, cosmic horror, and Lovecraftiana—from its historical roots through its most recent branches. This week, we celebrate National Poetry Month with a selection from 2025 Stoker nominee Maxwell Gold—“The Naigoth Waits,” “Where No One Goes,” and “Chthonic Dreams,” all published in May 2022 in The Horror Zine. Spoilers ahead! (What does it mean to spoiler poetry? Does it describe the story threading through? Linguistic turns that otherwise delight? Just click the link: avoid these hazards, do!) Once more, the beastly task that is trying to summarize a poem rears its mocking head. A longer poem, especially a narrative one like Coleridge’s “Christabel,” that’s doable. The shorter the poem, the less it tells a straightforward story, the harder the exercise, and the less “useful.” I visualize one of these poems as an Australian thorny devil (Moloch horridus), not to be confused with the North American horned lizards (genus Phrynosoma) that can squirt foul-tasting blood from their eyes. Thorny devils don’t have to shoot no damn blood from their eyes or anywhere else, because just looking at their array of defensive spikes is enough to make an attacker’s eyes bleed. Plus they have a fleshy bulb on their napes that they can present as their real head. Poems also have fake heads, often in multiples. The predatory summarizer, thinking they’ve spotted the gist of a piece, snaps at it only to be humiliated in front of their lit-crit packmates. And off scoots the lizard-poem, having defied capsulization once again. What the parting whisk of its tail signifies is: Dare my thorns, read me whole, or go hungry.  Nevertheless, I’m going to write three summaries, one for each of Gold’s prose poems. To keep them concise, I’ll attempt to do it in haiku-form. “The Naigoth Waits” What is a naigoth?Maybe it has leath’ry wings.Graveyards figure, too. “Where No One Goes” The keep of NäigöthsHungers, yearns, with entropy.I think it can’t be. “Chthonic Dreams” I’ve dreamt of foul thingsCrawling ‘neath the world’s bedsheets.No more sleep for me. What’s Cyclopean: Tenebrific skies. Chthonic palaces and dreams. Rubescent auras. Weirdbuilding: What’s a naigoth anyway? It sounds like it might be related to a shoggoth from Yuggoth. Or a Nazgul. [ETA: Anne solves the mystery below.] Madness Takes Its Toll: If you don’t ever sleep, guess what happens? Buy the Book Neurotica: Poems Maxwell I. Gold Buy Book Neurotica: Poems Maxwell I. Gold Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget Ruthanna’s Commentary Like the Weird itself, poetry is hard to define. My own grasp is tenuous enough that when I commit poetry, I tend toward rhyme and scansion (as you all saw last week). It may or may not be good—indeed, there are cynical critics who dismiss the whole of formal poetry as played out—but it’s undeniably not ordinary prose. Whereas free verse falls into the murky chasm of knowing it when you see it. A mood piece with lots of line breaks and good wordplay might be as easily sold for a drabble as a poem. Perhaps, like the dragons and spaceships of cover art, it’s all just marketing. Once you’ve found something you like, it doesn’t matter what shelf you grabbed it from. In this case, the shelf in question was the 2025 Stoker poetry shortlist. Six names I don’t know, and Maxwell Gold has undeniably Weird pieces online. Very nearly old-school, his stuff reminds me of Lovecraft’s Fungi From Yuggoth cycle. No sonnets here, but the mood rests on unapologetic worldbuilding and neologism. Näigöths flap from poem to poem, motifs repeat, everything slips through the sands of Lady Hourglass. That’s the worldbuilt showing, but there’s also direct telling: we don’t have to guess how the narrator feels. It’s a litany of classic attraction-repulsion: drawn, gripped, uneasy, curious, afraid. Adjectives mix the straightforward “darkest” and “despicable” with the sesquipedalian “tenebrific.” And then there’s the “fuckery.” Which I love, because whomst among us hath not looked around as elder gods rise and reality slides into Nyarlathotepian chasms, and thought, “Not this fuckery again.” The horror isn’t that something new is rising to overturn our comfortable lies, but that the comfortable lies are so far back that we can barely make them out by squinting, and the eldritch worst has become all too familiar. Lovecraft assumes the Dreamlands, with all its wonders and terrors, reachable. Navigable is a whole different question, but the problem with what lies beyond the wall of sleep is that it’s hard not to go there. Gold, however, is squamosifying anxiety-ridden insomnia. “Hideous things” crawl “underneath the bedsheets of the world.” Try to sleep, and the Sisyphean fuckery is right there under the surface. Stay awake, avoiding the nightmares that divide “sleep” from “actually resting,” and REM will pursue you anyway, sticking golems and beasts and “zombified skeletons” in every corner. “Every day” you’re thinking about them, and yet that lack of escape doesn’t make it any easier to close your eyes. This is my favorite imagery of the poem set: the pull between sleep and sleeplessness demonstrably as no-win as that between attraction and repulsion. Nightmares are a living force, perhaps with more agency than the non-sleeper at whom they “paw.” The “broken palaces” are made more disturbing by their location “under the crusty nethers of oblivion.” It’s both cosmic and greasily corporeal. And yet, it’s not blood’n’guts’n’cannibalism, just the miserable embodiment of lying in bed two hours after you lay down and five before you have to get up and do things. Sisyphean fuckery indeed. The other line that fascinates me is the bedsheet-lurkers chasing the non-dreamer “through graveyards of time and space where no one would remember me, forsake me, or dare to understand why I never slept”. The fear of being forgotten is familiar, common, Lovecraftian. But the other two: why fear that no one will forsake you? Especially while also fearing that they won’t understand your worst fears? Again, tension: the uncomfortable middle ground of having people who want to help, but don’t want to understand the Horrors well enough to actually help. But they keep trying… and you keep having to try and explain, when you haven’t gotten any sleep. Maybe? But how do they stay in this awkward middle ground while also forgetting you? Attraction and repulsion, cycles of fleeing and returning, and a tension that doesn’t resolve—maybe that’s what makes the poetry. Anne’s Commentary Hey, those haiku-summaries were fun! They also helped me focus on what I think are the “big messages” or “crucial observations” or (to evoke the most dreaded word teachers can utter in literature classes) the “themes” of Gold’s poems. I’m tempted to emulate Ruthanna’s comments from last week’s discussion of The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, in which she gave us an original poems in sharply ironic iambic septameter. I’d have to stick to haiku, though, and I’m afraid that would get self-indulgent after a dozen or so. “The Naigoth Waits” indeed had me asking the question that opens my summary-lyric for the poem: What’s a naigoth? Here’s the image of one to which my searches led me. It’s a figure designed for tabletop gaming by the phenomenally talented 3D artist Brayan Nafarrate. It appears to be Nafarrate’s creation rather than a creature of any “real-world” mythology. It’s hard to tell from the photograph, but zooming in on projections to the beast’s sides seems to show leathery webbed wings. Scale the naigoth up enough and send a flock of them out over “graveyards of sword and sin,” these wings could probably “[darken] every earthly corner.” “Where No One Goes” mentions a Castle of Näigöths—alternate spelling for the same monster? “Grinning statues of despicable winged creatures” guard the surrounding landscape. Maybe they’re representations of naigoths extant or extinct. That maybe-avatar of Time, the Lady Hourglass rules here among the “chthonic palaces and decayed ruins,” although if she’s actually littered “vast fantastic dreamscapes” with her sands, I wonder if she’s in much greater shape herself. Besides, whisperers in the “stony corridors” spread “galactic rumors” that “there’s not much time left,” so is there concurrently not much remaining of Lady Hourglass’s recording innards? Hungry old entropy gnaws away at the Castle; inevitably, like other dreams, it will disappear “through the dark apertures of [the narrator’s] thoughts.” And through those “dark apertures” is where no one goes, or can go. Without the dreamer, can there be a dreamland? With his third poem, Gold grabs me at “chthonic,” one of my favorite weird-fiction words. “Thon-ik” is evidently the right pronunciation, though I tend to forget and say “Chuh-thon-ik.” It refers specifically to the ancient Greek gods and other mythological beings who live in the underworld or underground. More generally, it refers to all things earthly, earthy, dark, or deep-rooted. Brian Lumley named the tentacled slug monsters in his Burrowers Beneath Chthonians. Gold grabs me even harder with his first sentence: “Not a day goes by when I don’t tremble at the thought of hideous things crawling underneath the bedsheets of the world.” It’s bad enough to picture monsters tunneling or cave-dwelling or even cellar-slumming underfoot, but monsters in your bed? And not just lurking behind the bedskirt but crawling in the sheets. Getting all noxiously intimate with your naked toes and skin while contemplating where in all this slumbering lusciousness they should sink their teeth or mandibles or stingers or stiletto-tipped feet or ovipositors for the love of all benevolent gods…. Gold could be using “bedsheets” metaphorically, to refer to the epidermal layers of the earth, below which chthonic things live. But I think too highly of him to believe that. I believe he wants us to twitch in our covers tonight, anticipating a slimy/chitinous/squamous brush against our soles. Not that the other two poems are deficient in this regard, but “Chthonic Dreams” bursts with darkly gorgeous images and language. “The muck and rust of time.” Monsters that “rattled their tired bodies” while “coated in greasy, dirty possibilities.” “Broken palaces under the crusty nethers of oblivion.” Listen, if there’s one experience you don’t want to have, it’s being broken under oblivion’s crusty nethers. Not that I’d know. Or that I’m implying Gold would know, personally. Let’s just say we both heard about it from friends to be left unnamed. Okay. Let’s close with an appropriate haiku. Or two. No more, I promise. To dream is a risk.Time, past, future, live in dreams,Waiting to get you. Not to dream is worse.To rise intact, more or less,That’s braving the fight. Next week, we get back to Good Stab’s stabbing story in Chapters 9-10 of The Buffalo Hunter Hunter.[end-mark] The post The Same Thing I Do Every Night: Poetry by Maxwell Gold appeared first on Reactor.