John T. Carney
The April First Selected Poet is John T. Carney
Please feel free to email John at: Jtimcarney@aol.com
THE GAMING PALACE
Again, they were at the pier,
The Game Pigeons,
Clustered about in thick groups,
Knowing no order,
Yet only the ceaseless hunger for dissonance,
As, again, the great crowds bustled along the thoroughfare,
Gaming them with the Food of Disorder.
Some clustered about the Ferry Building,
Which had been renamed by some,
“The Gaming Palace,”
Where the mad were known only by the wise and the wary,
To game the crowds with voice tricks and acoustical wonders of the same,
Without the immediate knowledge of that unfortunate gathering.
There, against the backdrop of the background chatter,
The Voice Artists plied their wares,
Vending madness for free to those would hear their sales “pitch.”
To feed the pigeons the same Pomegranate Seeds,
Persephone devoured in Her folly of love.
Madness had taken on a new lover,
And cavorted endlessly about the wharves,
In that City by The Bay,
Whose Voice was never at rest.
There, if you would, you can find out what you’re “hearing,”
At the Devil’s Playground,
Where the Mad make merry with one another,
For the sake of the same.
Every seeking glory from those who have none,
And yet finding none save in the moment’s vanity,
Elusive as the moment’s passing,
And fleeting as a glance in Eternity’s Mirror.
As they pass one another along the walkway,
They trade barbs of reference,
To see who “controls” who;
To find out who is “talking to “who.”
“The Gaming Palace” is filled with busy, thronging mobs,
Blissfully unaware of who’s “talking” to them.
An unofficial act had come to town,
And the Voice Throwers had just arrived from the local madhouse,
To entertain the crowd.
The problem was:
They would never find out how entertained they were,
Until they, too, had arrived at the madhouse,
Lacking the company of the same for their trouble.
And bereft of the extra baggage of their sanity.
I HEARD DEATH’S VOICE AT HAMPTON COURT
Light, snowy almond blossoms were falling,
That day, at Hampton Court,
When we came to visit,
In the Winter of ’65.
A light drizzle sent the gnarled boughs of the nearby trees,
Dripping with gray, frenzied convulsions,
As if beset with strange, midday terrors,
In trepidation of things which were and were not,
As such, within the palpable terror of Cognition.
So, it was as we strode about with the tour, that day, in ’65,
Taking in the marvelous scenery,
That I realized something, off key,
Could be heard,
Muttering vaguely,
Like Death’s own Winter Whisper,
Between the rain-soaked boughs,
Beckoning in brief, hissing gasps, like that of The Sirens,
Emanating from the far off trees, just there,
While clasping the cold of the Winter Air,
Within his stone-cold hands,
Touching the creeping flesh,
Of the closest, horror-stricken visitor,
As if, solely, to remind him of The Reaper’s,
Ever Omnipresent Sentience,
While observing all that dared walk there.
Suddenly, “I just wish I could convince my husband to die, out here.”
A Ventriloquist said, in a detached, floating off-key tone, somewhere, to my left,
As if the crisp, haunted air, itself, had gasped the words, somewhere, within the icy shadows.
A “Voice From the Dead,” recalling itself, suddenly, to my withdrawn Cognition.
The “Woman Beside Me,” whom I’d married three years before,
Of all the many Ventriloquists, still, haunting Hampton Court and Longleat,
Had put her former Lover in the Mad House,
Where he’d died,
Tormented by whatever the same, previous, twisted phrase,
Could only suggest.
THE .44 MAGNUM VISITOR
Distant shades moved amidst the midnight trees,
Sibilant whispers could be heard, muttering, amongst the gathered, Ponderosa pines,
Bowing with clustered shoulders about something I couldn’t quite glimpse,
Between the craggy boulders,
Just beyond our Lake Tahoe cabin.
Someone or something was “out there.”
Shrugging it off, the obscene image in my mind, I went to bed.
At about seven in the morning,
I discovered that our distant cousin, Ted,
Had arrived, sometime, during the night,
And was busy, cooking us some breakfast.
Without waiting for me to ask, he said simply,
“I thought I’d see what you’d do,
If I got here, way before you would ever realize it.”
I stood, quietly, for just a moment, a tad annoyed with this unanticipated intrusion.
Then, “I think I got that quite a bit earlier, the other night,”
Was all I said.
“Oh,” he answered.
Just moments later, I very wisely removed,
Our 44 Magnum from its foyer desk drawer, in the hall,
Before “Cousin Ted” did.
John T. Carney was born on December 13th, 1960, and lives in The East Bay, across from San Francisco. He’s been out of the horror poetry writing field for a brief while. It has been more than two years since he has been published in The Horror Zine, the former Death Head Grin zine from Larry Green, and Estronomicon, a British zine.
He returns here with several new poems intended to provoke some thought-provoking chills as you read.