It Comes

The thing pounded

On the door,

The walls trembling

Like a tiny drop of water

Whose gluish orb bobbles on the ceiling

And whose strength will give out soon.

 

I glanced at my companion.

“We’re going to die,” I said.

 

“That’s not the worst thing to happen.

Look at it this way,” he said,

As his whites boiled and bled,

Their veins clawing around the irides,

The irides choking the pupils,

And the pupils popping out

As bullets which shot and spilled

Onto the floor to scatter about.

 

I didn’t want to see it that way,

But I had to anyway.

And so my eyes did that too.

 

It had entered.

 

We impled

To the table,

Our resolve splitting

Like a dry clump of clay

Which shatters into gray crumbs

And is lost among grains of sand forever.

 

Once inside,

The thing fed us.

It apportioned the squirming morsels to us each,

psychopompously stretching its many elbowed arms

across the table and into our mouths.

 

And now we can speak the truth too,

As it did before us so bold.

Night spoils soon,

But the untold tales still shriek to me to be told.

The Bleeders

The bloodsuckers are among us

They only come out at night

Gather the crosses, the garlic, the silver

Protect your throat from their bite

 

They have drunk too much already

It gurgles and roils inside their gut

Dead – they never piss it out

So bulbous and bloated they strut

 

Their rupturing skin splits away

The crimson flows from every pore

And after they gather a man into their mouth

They come for more and more and more

 

Pregnant with blood they roam

The few who escape are all alone.

No wails they weep,

Their cries they keep.

For with no moans or tears inside, they will hollow

And as shells with no yoke will shatter,

Drifting to nooks where the dawn never reaches,

They will scatter.

Murder

The female form, in its elegant way,

Can blind a man for nearly a day.

 

But summer will end, she knows the tune,

Abandon the bar and the lipstick maroon

 

Terrible machine howls down road

Squirming brain can’t release its hold.

 

Fragile frame gobbled apart

Body die, soul depart.

 

Beauty never again displayed

Black blood boils in the glare of a Texas day.

The Road Leads to Nowhere

The eyes gaze through the portal

Into the somber glow

Where the eating has given way

To the stumbling down below.

 

The daylight never tarries

For someone such as me

Though each and every moment

feels like eternity.

 

And so I must diminish

That is all that’s left to do,

My recollection fading

And my memory of you.

 

I spread the blood on the floor

They’ll think I’m a dangerous man

It’ll look like I slew a hundred more

But I can only kill as fast as I can.

North Country

Across the wintered fields

The cauldron seethes. Its vapor and smoke

Blots out stars, moon and sun

The hungry slink through the twilight and choke

To feed from what should be shunned.

 

Yawning round mouth,

It calls them in as they desperately stare.

Gingerly they touch the rim

Soon to join the brew: bone, flesh and hair

They clamber up and dive within.

 

The wind softly sighs

Like a wound her form appears

She dips her spoon, draws things apart

A warty lip drinks of their tears

The witch hoists aloft the melting heart.

 

Lightning crackles

Her curse replete with awful gloom

It will remove all merry mirth

Will seize the shadow from the moon

And place it down upon the earth.

 

So while we yet have time,

let us wallow in love under the tapering glow

In the wind of the North Country.

Locate the sorrow which all shall soon know

Her cackle can find its way to me.