The March-April Featured Poet is Ed Blundell
Please feel free to email Ed at: edblundell@talktalk.net
VAMPYR
Somewhere once on an outworld,
In a place that wasn’t a place
But shacks and a store around a shaft
Where they’d found a zirconium trace.
The miners were hard and callous men,
The scum of a dozen worlds’ jails,
Gathered together to drink and forget
And tell one another tall tales.
They told tales of the rings of Saturn,
Yarns of the deserts of Mars,
They talked about women and lust and sin,
And the legends of the stars.
Then one old, seasoned veteran,
With a shaven and tattooed head,
In hushed and fearful whispers
Told the story of the undead.
The story of leech-like beings
Who fed on living blood,
An eldritch race of vampyrs,
Created before the Flood.
Creatures who through the ages
Mankind had learned to dread.
To burn and stake and persecute,
The Vampyr, the Undead.
And tough as they were and brave with drink,
A sobering sense of doom,
Fell like a shadow of present death
Across that drinking room.
Next morning they found three dead in the mine,
By the light of a flickering lamp,
Their throats torn out, and the bald headed man,
Was missing from the camp.
No one knew where he came from
And no one could guess where he fled
But they prayed to whatever gods they knew,
To protect them from the undead.
THE FOLLOWER
I close my eyes, I hear a noise,
A sound inside my head,
Of footsteps tramping after me,
It fills me full of dread.
My eyes are open, silence falls,
The footsteps ring no more,
Perhaps I just imagined it,
Although I can’t be sure.
I close my eyes and hear once more,
The footsteps heavy tread,
But they are getting closer now,
My eyelids feel like lead.
My weary eyes are firmly shut,
There’s nothing I can see
But still I hear the clattering
Of footsteps following me.
The steps are right behind me now,
I can’t unlock my eyes,
I shout in silent terror
But no one hears my cries.
A feel a hot and foetid breath,
I turn as in a dream,
And close to me, something I see,
I scream, I scream, I scream,
I scream, I scream, I scream, I scream.
NIGHT VISITOR
Come to me out of the darkness,
Fly swift at the break of the day.
Take of me, drink me and drain me
Before you must go on your way.
Redder than bright summer roses,
The blood that runs down my white skin.
Thirsting and craving you drink me,
Each night as I welcome you in.
Weary and pallid the hours,
I wait till I see you again.
Dull, pale and cold is the contact,
I have with the grey world of men.
Restless the night while I wait you,
All sleepless the dark hours slip by,
Till half light and then I shall see you,
Come fluttering out of the sky.
Lover and demon and vampire,
I am yours since first I was kissed,
Caught in the web of the creature,
Ensnared in your ancient blood tryst.
Ed Blundell has worked as a teacher of English, a school inspector and as Director of Education for the town of Stockport in England.
He enjoys music and visits the theatre, cinema, opera and ballet regularly. In the summer he grows organic vegetables and flowers and in the winter he travels widely in Europe and the UK.
Ed has had short stories and poetry published in over thirty magazines in the U.K. and the U.S. including Premonitions, Awen, Abandoned Towers, Purple Patch, Handshake, Orbis and DeathHeadGrin and has recently had a collection of his poems, “Sweet Nothings” published by Atlantean Press.
He stopped searching for the meaning of life when he discovered there wasn’t one.