The December Editor's Pick Poet is
Bryan Medof
Please feel free to email Bryan at: brymed78@yahoo.com
FACES IN THE WALLS
What of those imperfections on my walls?
The longer I stare at them,
the more they begin to look like screaming faces,
tortured by something unknown,
trapped in time on these large drywall photographs
of my room.
But then I begin to wonder,
as I swear I saw moment,
with their evil eyes shifting as the shadows
creep along as soft light from an adjacent room spills in,
that maybe their twisted, stretched mouths
aren’t screaming after all, but instead laughing . . .
Laughing at me, as if they know something that I don’t,
mocking me, mocking my ignorance!
I keep reassuring myself that I have nothing to fear,
they are merely bumps, and the shadows cast by subtle light,
but in the back of my mind,
they are more than just imperfections on my walls,
they are alive some how, or dead, living dead?
And I sense, whatever they may be, they are truly evil!
I’m frightened, and they know it.
These faces are becoming more lucid to me,
extending out, as if trying to escape the bounds
that usually hold them at bay.
Soon, they’ll finally be freed,
and what horror will they bring with them?
If I don’t look at them, I’ll be safe,
but my eyes are drawn to them anyway,
like moths to light.
And I know there is little time left
before the faces in the walls
escape completely . . . and enter my soul.
HELL IS A MASOCHIST'S HEAVEN
The old man with pierced and stretched skin,
who is full of scares and lesions . . .
longs for eternal pain.
He’s afraid to die, not because of hell,
but of not existing.
He invites the lake of fire, and if he could burn off
all of his flesh now and still live,
he’d do it in a heartbeat.
In hell . . . you are promised to live in anguish for eternity,
and if that’s true, he wants to be there!
The only thing stopping him from killing himself now
is the possibility that hell doesn’t exist outside
the feeble imagination of mankind.
No hell? No heaven? No afterlife?
It is hard to imagine not existing, and that invokes
his greatest fear, a contradiction –
both exhilaration and dread.
Beat him, burn him, mutilate him, tear off his flesh,
gouge out his eyes, plunge him into eternal darkness!
He can hardly contain himself just thinking about the
endless possibilities of pain that he hasn’t yet
been able to experience here on earth.
The old man knows that it is hard for people to understand
what he is, though he himself doesn’t know why
or how he became this way, where pain and pleasure
somehow became synonymous.
Everybody seems to fear what he embraces,
he daydreams that a sadistic serial killer
would choose him as their helpless victim.
Oh, if only he knew for certain that hell truly existed,
he’d actively search for a psychopath’s sick perversions.
The old man’s luck would be if hell did exist,
that he would be sent to heaven instead,
where he would feel pain no more,
perhaps he will get off on the thought that
heaven is now his psychological torment!
Either way, the old man hopes heaven and hell
is real, and when he gets there,
that it will be . . . intolerantly tolerant.
FERAL CATS OF THE NIGHT
Oh feral cats of the night,
your love moans are like nails on a chalkboard,
always when I’m sound asleep of course.
Sometimes I don’t wake up,
and those feline presents enter my dream world,
raping it!
My pleasant dreams quickly turn into nightmares,
sounding like unrest souls of the dead,
screaming cries that sometimes terrifies me,
and at the same time,
has me grieving for whatever poor souls
they happen to be,
being afflicted by such unfair torment.
Then I wake up, with my heart beating out of my chest,
and I realize, its only those damn cats in heat.
Now I don’t believe prostitution
should be legalized, however,
since I’m apparently running a “cat-brothel”,
I feel that I should be compensated
for my trouble.
And so, I bang against my bedroom window,
Yelling at them,
and then I go back to sleep,
just to be awaken again by those
feral cats of the night!
Bryan Medof lives in Riverside, California. He is an aspiring artist, specializing in oil and acrylics, a classical pianist, composer and periodically teaches the piano and music theory. Bryan is currently writing a novel. His interests other than the arts: philosophy, forensic psychology, astronomy, world history and ancient mythology.