A Horror Poem
Tatania Lapina – Unsplash
……
Outside my
Home of wood and pealing paint,
Half a sky-blue colour, half… not
Behind unloved pickets once white
Now a pale washed barricade that
Halts the garden weeds’ escape.
Six throttled roses gasp for breath
……
Only their scrawny thorned throats remain
The weather boards peel along hairline splits
Come unsprung
Leaving gaps for the fat rats to squeeze their
Hairy bodies and naked pink snake tails
Into those dark small spaces
Only rats can reach.
They snuggle in against the wall behind my bedhead
Their moving brushing fur noise is profoundly unsettling
Almost as bad as their continuous gnawing
Their pointy little teeth on wood—gnawing hard at the wall struts
Blackboard nail scrapes along my already stripped out nerves
Who can sleep with rodents perched so close behind my head?
……
I pull a pillow over my face and stuff it over my ears
Hope the toothy random scratching will cease
Truth be told,
I a not well, ill I am
And I can’t breath under this coarse ivory pillow case,
Suffocating.
……
I plop my damp haired head back on the pillow
Hold up one clammy hand
It’s so pallid, is it mine?
I see the finger bones in x-ray
The rats have ceased their infernal chewing their way
Into my bedroom, thank god
I listen hard can’t hear them, only
The whistling wires inside my head of neurones misfiring
My brain-case lit up by light-speed neutrinos
The white-hot streaks zip right through me
……
As I may have said (but cannot remember)
I have some bad illness
In my darkened room I lie abed
The breathful puffing out of the nervous curtains
Over the low-light window sill
Flaps irregular ominous rust shapes
Onto the bedroom’s water-stained wall
I watch the creepy shadows shift
In the dim corners; the ghostly parade grows and
Fades from my sweating brow and
Its outlandish chimeric fancies
……
Again that sound
That weasel-gouging of wood grounds
I lift my brows an inch, listening
(Surely they’ll bore through)
But can’t hold my too large head up
And drop it back into the dent of my leprous pillow
I imagine my foreshortened self under the covers
An Uccello perhaps, the slaughtered soldiers and broken spars
All lying in perfect perspective
My body lies as straight too
My arms and weak fingers by my side
Under the antique parchment ceiling
Higher than the last time I stared
……
I clamp my eyes shut fast,
Feel timidly for the water glass
Fingers wrap around the cold familiar form—
I flub it over!
For god’s sake! the liquid slides across the little table
Dribbles over the edge onto the threadless carpet
The glass keeps rolling too
It falls slow motion
And clonks onto the floor, bounces stops
Too far away for me to bother fetching
……
I watch the ceiling (now it seems much closer),
The dark corner stain overhead—it always looked bad,
A charcoal scape spread wide and
A too long inhuman head looming
I shudder, tense up,
Again the rats scratching fur body brushing
The wallpaper wall sounds thin as tissue
I slide my body further away to the foot of the bed
A poorly corpse I feel
A shivery heat rushes up my backbone
But my feet are cold—I don’t feel my toes
……
If the rats break through I’ll just lie still
Their grey hairy bodies and little animal claws
Might ignore me
They’ll plop out one by one
Fall on my bed around my head
The oily creatures
I can almost feel them brush my cheeks
Nuzzle pink wiggling noses at my neck
Scuttle onto my chest, searching
For food that’s soft and close and warm
Probing beneath the sheets with little hooked hands
……
I am hot and fever-struck—I whisper:
There are no rats
Yet I hear them—earwigs drilling into my brain
The sodden sheets stick to my body
I lie embalmed on a slab
Swaddled in linen bands behind the round stone
Hold my breath and risk a peek at the evil shape above
It is nearer, hovering over me,
I feel a rancorous breath on my face and turn aside
But the bruised smell of decay I can’t escape
……
I close my eyes, stop my ears, take a shallow breath—anything
To avoid that horror smell, the effluvium of Dante’s circles
Lie very still, hold one small breath,
I hear a profound silence for a second, two
Before the sawing gnawing starts anew
Could even be in the back of my head
Maybe they’re through
On my pillow already, waiting
……
I take a tight breath hitched through a blocked tea strainer
It snags, stuck in my throat that pathetic packet—
I need more air, my lungs hardly expand
The little thin air
Passes slowly over my cold lips, not much
I wheeze out the tiny gasp of oxygen
Wouldn’t keep a rat alive for long
……
I lie abed in my accursed shroud
If anybody comes and the rats get out
A skeleton they’ll find, they
Might wonder how I died
How I was whittled down
……
The wallpaper by my head tears open
The rats, I knew they’d come
The black cloak enfolds me as I breathe out
Then try hard to draw in air, but there’s none
I lie straight and still one last time
I’ve been sick