POETRY BY SIMON MacCULLOCH
Simon MacCulloch lives in London. His poems live in Reach Poetry, The Dawntreader, Spectral Realms, Aphelion, Black Petals, Grim and Gilded, Ekstasis, Pulsebeat Poetry Journal, Ephemeral Elegies, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Emberr, View from Atlantis, Altered Reality, The Sirens Call, The Chamber Magazine, I Become the Beast, Lovecraftiana, Awen and elsewhere.
WHEN I GROW UP
I must have a misshapen manservant
To haul the cadavers at night,
Or screw down the lid of my coffin
As soon as he’s tucked me in tight,
And open the door to the visitors
The warnings of peasants invite.
I must have a crumbling castle
With rodents and cobwebs galore,
And passageways leading to dungeons
Behind every pointy-arched door,
Where creaky old engines of torture
Are rusty with monochrome gore.
I must have a goggle-eyed maiden
Who wakes at the sound of my tread,
And wanders around in her nightie
And screams fit to waken the dead,
Then faints, so the misshapen manservant
Can carry her back to her bed.
But mainly my need’s for a nemesis,
Most stalwart and upright of men,
Who’ll figure out how to dispatch me,
And burn down the castle, and then
Come back in a series of sequels
To do it again and again.
NIGHT OF THE SKULLFLOWER
This is the spot where the rays of the moon
Stir the soil’s pot like a long silver spoon.
This is the night when the skullflowers bloom
Bone-shiny white from the cracks in your tomb.
Watch as a bud calmly opens its eye,
Sucked from the mud by the mouth of the sky.
These are the part of you death could not kill,
Seeded in heart, now a soft pallid spill,
Newborn but old as the stars’ ancient heat,
Naked and cold and improbably sweet,
Living and dead. Now I pluck one to save
And find that instead I have dug the moon’s grave.
GROWING MY GHOST
My fingers would lengthen at night and twine
Round the furniture, soft but tight, a vine
That extended its tendrils in twists to choke
Every crevice; I thought of fists, and woke.
In the morning the corpses of mice would lie
Round my bed, as if squashed in a vice, and I
Would examine my wrinkled-up skin, as if
I was growing new bones in it, thin and stiff.
So it went, till the night when the house was all
In my grasp, not a chink where a mouse could crawl,
And the spiders were webbed in my flesh like flies,
And the windows peered blind from their mesh disguise.
In the morning they took what was left away,
And the house echoes empty, bereft, by day;
But the black grapes of darkness, they grow from me,
And the black wine of Acheron, flowing free.
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