POETRY BY ALLAN ROZINSKI

Allan Rozinski is a writer of speculative fiction and poetry who has had poetry published in Spectral Realms, Weirdbook, Horror Writers Association Poetry Showcase, The Rhysling Anthology, and other publications. He is a member of the Horror Writers Association and the Science Fiction Poetry Association. He can be found on Facebook.  

 

TUMBLEWEEDS

One follows another:
they have spurned
their mother,
the very ground
that gave them sustenance,
while their father, well, he rolls  
whichever way the breeze blows.

The rule to permanence is seed, root,
body, bloom; but not for
these dead vessels: they are like          
the prickly tumbleweeds,     
blown to and fro by the vagaries  
of an errant wind,                   
cast adrift to spill their seed  
and move on.

If they could only again know
the lingering warmth of the sheltering soil
and the reasons the earth
could give them to remain,
would it be enough
to fill them with the feeling
that life itself
provides its own meaning?

Seed, root, body, bloom: this is the
pattern of life’s expression, but instead   
they turn away     
and the price they pay
to escape the entanglement
of root and bloom . . .
hollow husks haunting the barren plain.

THE MUTANT STRAIN

In outward appearance, it was seemingly
born of man and woman, yet somehow
apart, strange and forbidding; in another
time, there would have been the persistent
impulse to abandon it early on,
if not to have it met with death more directly
before the time to act had passed and gone.

It defied all common convention and
definition of humanity, thriving
only when draining the life from
everything around it, a constant
reminder of death’s waiting knell,
a departure from the pursuit of a
hopeful vision for the future of our
species and to instead force us onto
a perverse path leading into an
uncharted, uncanny realm.

Then came the not-so-subtle hints of what    
might happen to those who should fail to         
appease it, they now sensing with dreadful
certainty that its apocalyptic
reach was much further than anyone could
know, it wearing its sinister promise
and radiant menace like a final,
ornamental crown.

DISPELLING SOME ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT WITCHES

Witches don’t all wear black pointy hats
and dark, flowing sorceress’s robes. They   
don’t all have warts on hawk-billed noses
and jutting chins, nor do they routinely cackle

through sinister grins. They don’t even possess a
general appearance of unattractiveness that
might give some cause to suspect that the reason
they’d become witches in the first place was

because they’d sat at home alone brooding too many 
Saturday nights. And forget about them flying   
through the air riding brooms, or dancing
naked in a circle under a full moon…yet,

real witches do appear to achieve their ends
by supernatural means, at times requiring
either their victims or those desperate for aid
to ingest a mixture of ingredients made 

for insidious effect, accompanied with
incantations dark and strange, afflicting
their victims with conditions that can range

from halitosis, scabies, thrombosis, or alopecia;
entice the prudish to succumb to endless bacchanalia;
subject the cheerful to the dense fog of melancholia;
or flood a mind with images channeled from the goddess of mania.  

Those seeking the services of a witch with money in hand
may find the price to be paid well exceeds remunerative demand,
as when spells are cast forcing another to love in untruth, 

to gain riches and power, or to recapture one’s youth;
all fraught with complications and unforeseen perils, forsooth…
Still, the fulfillment of at least one of these three desires
is to what most supplicants of a witch aspire.