POETRY BY SIMON MacCULLOCH

Simon MacCulloch lives in London and publishes poems in a variety of journals, including Spectral Realms, The Horror Zine, Black Petals, Dreams and Nightmares, Reach Poetry, Pulsebeat Poetry Journal, View from Atlantis and The Cannon’s Mouth.

UNBURIED

The earth hits the wooden lid, a soft dead thud,
And the air in the coffin tastes as thick as blood.
But it’s only an experiment, you needn’t scream;
You close your eyes, compose yourself and start to dream.

The tests when they let you out are quite routine
And don’t really explicate the things you’ve seen.
The feeling that your body is a bag of slime
Is “merely fear-suggestion; it will pass with time.”

You can’t start relationships, they couldn’t last
With day just a pinprick and the night so vast.
The pills that they give you only make things worse;
The tomb has been desecrated—you’re the curse.

You talk very little and you barely eat;
You plod like a zombie down the lamplit street
To seek out the tombstones that you hope might tell
The deep-buried secret that you know too well.

The slabs stay silent and the soil lies mute,
So you dig with your fingers into mud and root
Till you’re one with the worms within the teeming muck,
Snug within the pit in which your dreams have stuck.

For the dreams are the part of you that you can’t contain,
And the flesh quickly withers but the dreams remain
To partake of the mysteries of death and birth
In the mind of the dreamer that we call the earth.

A DAINTY DISH

The baron raised the taxes on the barley, wheat and rye.
“No, not another sixpence will I pay; I’d sooner die,”
The farmer cried, and hung upon the scarecrow in his field
A sign that said “No robber baron gets Jack Johnson’s yield.”

He took it down the next day, but his caution came too late;
The baron’s man had seen it and it sealed poor Johnson’s fate.
They tied him to a cross, and where the scarecrow used to stand
He starved to death, and none there was who dared to raise a hand.

His corpse was picked by crows but still they wouldn’t cut it down.
“The birds,” the baron said, “Shall sing a song of his renown.”
His skeleton they buried in the field, and that was that;
They left a dawdling flock of crows, well sated, slow and fat.

And then the birds were gone, and soon the harvest feast came round,
And there amongst the tribute that he took the baron found
A great round pie. He ate it all, and after that his talk
Was nothing but a hideous, hungry, throat-blood-bubbling squawk.

Some nursery rhymes make sense when you have understood their history,
Though lose the quirky charm that was dependent on their mystery;
I serve you this example as a dainty dish to show
That what they really mean it’s best for children not to know.

THE HUMAN PINCUSHION

You’ll find his act on the carny bills;
Mr Porcupine’s got a thousand quills
And you pay to watch as he pokes them in.
Is it pain or fun in his grit-toothed grin?

And the tent is hot, and he’s fat, and sweats,
Till the barker asks for (and always gets)
The loan of an onlooker’s handkerchief
For a swipe at the sweat and the blood, and a sniff.

But I wouldn’t do that if I were you,
For that little sniff is your one good clue
To the scam that the pair are about to pull
To extract more green from another fool.

See, a telepath of a special kind
Who can soak up pain in his sponge-like mind
Only needs to blink to convey the lot
To the mind of a mark whose scent he’s got.

So the guy falls down, and he looks real ill,
And amongst the crowd there’s another shill
To take him back where the man explains
What he has to pay them to lose those pains.

And it’s lasted years, and the marks don’t tell
For they’re too damn scared by their taste of hell,
And the voodoo doll wipes his face and grins
As your pincushion brain takes a thousand pins.