POETRY BY SIMON MACCULLOCH

Simon MacCulloch lives in London. His poems appear 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 and others.

SHAPESHIFT

The moon makes you into a vampire—
No, wait, that’s not right.
The moon makes you into a werewolf—
That isn’t it, quite.
The moon makes you change into something
Some beast of the night
That needs to go prowling and hunting
And howl at its height
With eyes that have captured its silver
So cold and so bright
And pads that run swift on the pavement
And fangs that will bite.

But if we should meet in the shadows
(I hope that we might)
My bullet of silver will take you
Before you can fight
Then, dying, you’ll change back to human
A corpse to indict
This hero, and make me a villain
In everyone’s sight.
For that is the trick of the moon time:
When all’s black and white
We shift between each in an instant
My darkness, your light.

MAKING WAVES

The patterns of electrocorticogram pervade the screen:
We ponder what they represent, we wonder what they mean
And whether they can give a clue to where the man has been
Or correlate the images those bulging eyes have seen
Or tell us why his skin has turned that ghastly shade of green.

The dermatologists suggest pollution in the sea.
The man from Miskatonic always has to disagree.
The tissue people take their samples, mutter “odd” and flee.
The brainwaves surge and wriggle, seem to try to speak to me
As if some strange intelligence is struggling to be free.

I’ve started having dreams that last too long to fit the night.
The waves are always dancing at the edges of my sight.
They’re almost making sense, and now it seems to me they might
Be reaching out in sympathy, be beckoning to invite
Another muddy earthbound mind to swim into their light.

It only took a minute with a soldering iron and pliers
To make my own connection through a second set of wires
And oh, that sunken city with its swollen domes and spires
The shoals of fish-men swarming in their seaweed-lazy gyres
The black abysses lit by flameless vegetative fires!

Yet cold beneath the waves I feel an undertow of fear
A sense of something mountainously moving, heaving near.
I cannot look away; although it seems the more I peer
The closer it is drawn to me, its form becoming clear.
I see a questing tentacle, an eye—oh God, it’s here—

COFFIN TEXT

Corpse-breath ghosts make the moon shine wet,
Drip dribble-slow on the white-lit tombs,
Trickle fresh dew on the wilted blooms,
Soften the soil where the stones are set.

Tombstone teeth show a sheen of spit,
Moist in the mouth of the gaping night,
Stretch round the sky in a yawning bite,
Swallow the stars down a throat-dark pit.

Rooted in black writhes the wormish tongue,
Twisting its words from the coffined air,
Rich with the taste that has brewed down there,
Blown on the wind of decay’s puffed lung.

Hymns to the heavens or howls to hells,
Dreaming our way through the grave persists,
As long as foreknowledge of death exists;
Loud as the clang of a billion bells
Tolling a billion funeral knells:
Life is a lie that the death song tells.