Eye of the Moon, etc.
By
Simon MacCulloch
Eye of the Moon
I would peer up the telescope nightly,
for the stars were a drug in my veins;
but I hated the moon, glaring whitely
with its stolen glow shining too brightly
from a visage disfigured with stains.
Then it seemed that the darkness was dripping
and the Milky Way starting to boil,
so the moon was set bobbing and dipping,
till it filled up my lens and came slipping
down the tube like a bearing in oil.
It would lodge in my skull, fitting coldly,
displacing my telescope eye,
and its silvery vision would hold me
while the blackness of space would enfold me
and I’d drown in the pit of the sky.
I would stare into dreadful dim distance
unrelieved by the gleam of a star,
where eternity’s baleful persistence
was the only remains of existence
and the cosmos a fast-fading scar.
But my mind and my senses agreeing
that the moon had a different spin
brought the knowledge that what I was seeing
was the depths of my own empty being;
that eye looked not outwards, but in.
Now I hunt, else the emptiness kill me,
and I howl, else the silence be all;
but the flesh that I eat cannot fill me,
and the moon is a bullet to spill me,
and the stars are my blood as I fall.
Flight of the Fire Banshee
Smudge like the ghost of the pink flame of dawn
blurs in the rainbow and burns in the sunset,
ash in the air as she falls with the twilight,
caught and held cold in the jar of the night.
Where is the word that will unstop the bottle?
Whose is the will that can launch her anew?
Wish for a heaven, they give you a grave;
wish for damnation, they send you an angel.
Faust summoned Satan and Satan took Christ
up to the top of a world they believed in.
Christ got a church and Faust got a stage play;
bargain or not, it’s a shot in the dark.
Promise your ghost to the flight of the banshee;
she is the moth that can swallow the flame,
flung beyond grasping of FaustSatanChrist,
fresh as a wish while the galaxies wither.
That Ought to Crawl
The dead no longer want their bones.
They’ve passed into the earth;
they breathe through clay and see with stones.
The hissing grass construes the groans
that mark their strange rebirth.
This graveyard’s owners use a goat
to keep those tomb-beards trimmed
and when the mists of evening float
beneath the moon’s soft gravid bloat
a shaggy shape is limned.
The horns are higher off the ground
than such horns ought to be.
It makes a queer high bleating sound
and stumbles on from mound to mound
like one too sick to see.
But I have known its kind before
and used their talent well;
my coven’s eager to adore
the beast who tells them what’s in store
in heaven or in hell.
So Satan walks the world again!
I dress it in a cloak
and lead the rites of fear and pain
that never more than half-explain
the secrets that it spoke.
And thus the necromantic trick:
to make the dead souls dance
and let the living take their pick
while that which makes the cosmos tick
is blind, black-humoured Chance.
Simon MacCulloch lives in London and contributes poetry to a variety of publications, such as 7th-Circle Pyrite, Bowery Gothic, parABnormal Magazine and many others.
By
Simon MacCulloch
Eye of the Moon
I would peer up the telescope nightly,
for the stars were a drug in my veins;
but I hated the moon, glaring whitely
with its stolen glow shining too brightly
from a visage disfigured with stains.
Then it seemed that the darkness was dripping
and the Milky Way starting to boil,
so the moon was set bobbing and dipping,
till it filled up my lens and came slipping
down the tube like a bearing in oil.
It would lodge in my skull, fitting coldly,
displacing my telescope eye,
and its silvery vision would hold me
while the blackness of space would enfold me
and I’d drown in the pit of the sky.
I would stare into dreadful dim distance
unrelieved by the gleam of a star,
where eternity’s baleful persistence
was the only remains of existence
and the cosmos a fast-fading scar.
But my mind and my senses agreeing
that the moon had a different spin
brought the knowledge that what I was seeing
was the depths of my own empty being;
that eye looked not outwards, but in.
Now I hunt, else the emptiness kill me,
and I howl, else the silence be all;
but the flesh that I eat cannot fill me,
and the moon is a bullet to spill me,
and the stars are my blood as I fall.
Flight of the Fire Banshee
Smudge like the ghost of the pink flame of dawn
blurs in the rainbow and burns in the sunset,
ash in the air as she falls with the twilight,
caught and held cold in the jar of the night.
Where is the word that will unstop the bottle?
Whose is the will that can launch her anew?
Wish for a heaven, they give you a grave;
wish for damnation, they send you an angel.
Faust summoned Satan and Satan took Christ
up to the top of a world they believed in.
Christ got a church and Faust got a stage play;
bargain or not, it’s a shot in the dark.
Promise your ghost to the flight of the banshee;
she is the moth that can swallow the flame,
flung beyond grasping of FaustSatanChrist,
fresh as a wish while the galaxies wither.
That Ought to Crawl
The dead no longer want their bones.
They’ve passed into the earth;
they breathe through clay and see with stones.
The hissing grass construes the groans
that mark their strange rebirth.
This graveyard’s owners use a goat
to keep those tomb-beards trimmed
and when the mists of evening float
beneath the moon’s soft gravid bloat
a shaggy shape is limned.
The horns are higher off the ground
than such horns ought to be.
It makes a queer high bleating sound
and stumbles on from mound to mound
like one too sick to see.
But I have known its kind before
and used their talent well;
my coven’s eager to adore
the beast who tells them what’s in store
in heaven or in hell.
So Satan walks the world again!
I dress it in a cloak
and lead the rites of fear and pain
that never more than half-explain
the secrets that it spoke.
And thus the necromantic trick:
to make the dead souls dance
and let the living take their pick
while that which makes the cosmos tick
is blind, black-humoured Chance.
Simon MacCulloch lives in London and contributes poetry to a variety of publications, such as 7th-Circle Pyrite, Bowery Gothic, parABnormal Magazine and many others.
