The September Second Selected Poet is Ed Blundell

Please feel free to email Ed at: edblundell@talktalk.net

MOONLIGHT

The dark of the night was tangible,
The cut of the wind was keen,
Behind the black of the desolate sky,
The full moon hung unseen.
But the pull of its power cut through the clouds,
And the call of the wild in his brain,
Turned his blood into wolf blood,
So he howled like a man insane.
Let me loose to hunt in the woodland,
Let me chase and tear the kill,
Let me feel the quivering, dying limbs
Let me rip and eat my fill.
For the hunger I have is insatiable,
I must kill and kill again,
Lock me safe in this padded room,
The curse of the Werewolf strain.

VISITOR

No one knew where he came from,
They found him in the wood.
His clothes were torn and ragged,
His face was smeared with blood.

They found him in the morning,
His eyes were staring wild.
He spoke a foreign language
And he shivered like a child.

For weeks they nursed and fed him
And then when he was well,
They gave him pen and paper
So his story he could tell.

He drew them such strange pictures,
Of men with a single eye,
When they asked where they came from,
He pointed to the sky.

His pictures so alarmed them
They took away the pen,
For the things that he was drawing
Where not of the world of men.

They took him through the forest,
Showed him the way to go,
He was no longer welcome.
There are things men should not know.

REVENGE

On the bleak, bare, barren moor land,
Beneath a leprous moon,
White and bright in the cold, dark night
Like the eye of a gibbering loon.

Three men with a vengeful purpose,
We came to spill his blood,
Revenge for crimes he'd committed.
We knew it was not good.

We burst like wolves into his home
And dragged him from his bed.
We tied the noose around his neck
And dangled him till he was dead.

They screamed and begged and prayed for us
To spare that wretched life,
Two women pale, in the moonlight,
His daughter and his wife.

His wife shrieked to the gibbous moon,
"Revenge this cruel death"
Then with his knife, she took her life,
Cursing us with her last breath.

Now one of us went stark staring mad,
One hanged himself from that tree.
I ache and shake, each breath I take
And wait for the curse to break me.

From nightmare dreams, I awake all screams
Echoing in my head.
The blood we spilled that night we killed
Will haunt me till I am dead.

Ed Blundell worked as a teacher of English, a school inspector and as Director of Education for the town of Stockport.

Ed has had short stories and poetry published in over thirty magazines in the U.K. and the U.S. and has recently had a collection of his poems, Sweet Nothings, published by Atlantean Press. He has appeared in several horror zines including Abandoned Towers, The Horror Zine, Death Throes, Hellfirecrossroads, Lorelei Signal and Death Head Grin.