Let Me Introduce Myself, etc.
By
John Grey
LET ME INTRODUCE MYSELF
Step in. Don’t mind the smoke.
The fiend’s bronzed skin shimmers behind glass,
perched proud on the mantel,
above a hearth that bubbles like a witch’s brew.
And over here - the man-bat,
flapping his butcher’s knife wings.
Fancy a peek at the bedroom?
It’s a carnival of grotesques: monsters and demons,
oddities and arcana, headless trolls with grins
carved in their necks, limbless sprites,
pixies stitched like patchwork dolls.
Feast your crooked eye at a gorgon moth
with lizard hair, a beetle that eats flesh
like it’s Sunday roast, a mushroom with teeth,
a preacher, a foot tall, glassed in like a saint,
and a thing with tentacles, hundreds of them.
Heads line the walls,
not deer, not moose, but curious neighbors.
Downstairs, hybrid monkeys chatter,
and a two-headed leopard paces the floor of his cage.
Go on, smell this, poke that. Hear my latest mix:
a symphony of screams, previously recorded,
but still fresh as morning roadkill.
Pull back the sheet - see what’s on the slab.
Skeletons, all shapes and sexes, a rack,
an iron maiden, and a dungeon of rats,
famished, fearless, the hungriest hereabouts.
Enjoy the tour? That’s just the inner me.
Next up: the outer version. It’s quieter, less demonstrative.
And not the least grotesque. You may find that strange.
A DEMON INFESTATION
Why my house, demons?
As if I do not have already
a bevy of demons all my own.
Yet here you are, red of face
and fixated eyes, hellish whispers,
foul tongue and searing hot flesh.
But just try infiltrating my heart.
It’s occupied by worse than you.
And forget about your patented mind ooze.
My thought fiends will spit you back out.
My soul, of course, in your unholy grail.
Slip inside and you figure
you’ll assume the impious reins.
But they’re held by a grip
tighter and deadlier than your satanic clasp.
My soul is in the feverish clench
of foul and profane humankind.
It has enough demons already.
What it really needs is prey.
1912, WILSON FARMHOUSE MASSACRE
Corn stacked in the corner,
yellow ears drying.
On the shelves,
jars of berry jam
furred white with age.
The curtains
hung loose from the rod.
And an axe
on the floor,
its blade smeared with blood.
Everyone agrees,
it wasn’t the corn
or the jars
or the curtains…
it was the axe that did it.
John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in Midnight Mind, Willow Review and the Pennsylvania Literary Journal. Latest books, “Bittersweet”, “Subject Matters” and “Between Two Fires” are available through Amazon. Work upcoming in the MacGuffin, Touchstone and Willow Review.
By
John Grey
LET ME INTRODUCE MYSELF
Step in. Don’t mind the smoke.
The fiend’s bronzed skin shimmers behind glass,
perched proud on the mantel,
above a hearth that bubbles like a witch’s brew.
And over here - the man-bat,
flapping his butcher’s knife wings.
Fancy a peek at the bedroom?
It’s a carnival of grotesques: monsters and demons,
oddities and arcana, headless trolls with grins
carved in their necks, limbless sprites,
pixies stitched like patchwork dolls.
Feast your crooked eye at a gorgon moth
with lizard hair, a beetle that eats flesh
like it’s Sunday roast, a mushroom with teeth,
a preacher, a foot tall, glassed in like a saint,
and a thing with tentacles, hundreds of them.
Heads line the walls,
not deer, not moose, but curious neighbors.
Downstairs, hybrid monkeys chatter,
and a two-headed leopard paces the floor of his cage.
Go on, smell this, poke that. Hear my latest mix:
a symphony of screams, previously recorded,
but still fresh as morning roadkill.
Pull back the sheet - see what’s on the slab.
Skeletons, all shapes and sexes, a rack,
an iron maiden, and a dungeon of rats,
famished, fearless, the hungriest hereabouts.
Enjoy the tour? That’s just the inner me.
Next up: the outer version. It’s quieter, less demonstrative.
And not the least grotesque. You may find that strange.
A DEMON INFESTATION
Why my house, demons?
As if I do not have already
a bevy of demons all my own.
Yet here you are, red of face
and fixated eyes, hellish whispers,
foul tongue and searing hot flesh.
But just try infiltrating my heart.
It’s occupied by worse than you.
And forget about your patented mind ooze.
My thought fiends will spit you back out.
My soul, of course, in your unholy grail.
Slip inside and you figure
you’ll assume the impious reins.
But they’re held by a grip
tighter and deadlier than your satanic clasp.
My soul is in the feverish clench
of foul and profane humankind.
It has enough demons already.
What it really needs is prey.
1912, WILSON FARMHOUSE MASSACRE
Corn stacked in the corner,
yellow ears drying.
On the shelves,
jars of berry jam
furred white with age.
The curtains
hung loose from the rod.
And an axe
on the floor,
its blade smeared with blood.
Everyone agrees,
it wasn’t the corn
or the jars
or the curtains…
it was the axe that did it.
John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in Midnight Mind, Willow Review and the Pennsylvania Literary Journal. Latest books, “Bittersweet”, “Subject Matters” and “Between Two Fires” are available through Amazon. Work upcoming in the MacGuffin, Touchstone and Willow Review.
