Unspeakable Horror!

Visit me over at Unspeakable Horror!

The Gory Boy and Bloody Mary

Once upon a time there lived
an honest poor woodcutter;
he married an orphan girl
who harbored a secret:
an ogre in her ancestry,
and the ogre lineage corrupted her offspring.
She bore her husband twelve sons,
all of whom became wielders of axes.
The more sons she bore, the
more the ogre hunger grew in her,
and the more she took on the aspect of the ogre.

In secret, the sons murdered travelers on the road;
they felled travelers as regularly as tree trunks.

The father, outnumbered, said nothing
about the accumulation of strange riches in the house,
tokens from distant lands,
and he did partake of the savory stews in silence.

Then the thirteenth son was born in a torrent of blood
that drained the mother's life force.
The thirteenth son put his mother in the grave.

With his treasure trove of unusual and exotic items,
he attracted a new wife, the daughter of a wealthy merchant
who could find no suitor because of
the red birthmark that blotted out half of her face
like a blood mask.

Unlike his brothers, the thirteenth son was slight,
with a queer disposition and
a knack
for making dolls out of cast-off pieces of wood.

All day, the stepmother prepared stews with the strange meats
her stepsons brought her
while the fey little boy played with grotesque dolls,
always trying to sneak into the attic
where the stepmother kept her prized possession:
the ornate gypsy trunk.

The boy liked to gaze at his reflection in the pond,
liked to pretend he had friends
when he talked to his doll-brethren.

Again, the boy crept into the attic,
and knelt before the trunk.
This would be the last time, the stepmother vowed.
Inside the lid of the trunk: the mirror,
so much clearer than the pond—like a different world
(inside the trunk, the substance of shadow and mystery).
The boy leaned in closer to inspect his reflection.
The stepmother slammed the heavy lid,
which had a sharp metal lip—
chopped off his curious little head.

The stepmother put the boy’s limbs and penis in the stew,
but kept the torso and head in the gypsy trunk,
face upturned, eyes open toward the mirrored interior lid,
which reflected shadow and blood.

The father found the boy's bloody dolls on the trail.
Wolves, he said.

Five years later,
the stepmother opened the trunk
to stroke the orbital sockets
of her stepson’s skull,
to remember her delicious victory over the boy,
but the trunk contained nothing but shadow;
the mirror had cracked.
The boy, nothing but bone and ghost—
absorbed into the mirror realm
where Bloody Mary reigns as queen.

In the mirror realm, he became the Gory Boy,
gave his belly button to Bloody Mary as a payment
so he could live forever,
and Bloody Mary attached his head with a silk scarf
woven by the insectoid gods
who dwell in the muddy underburrows.
Bloody Mary carved him the limbs of a marionette
and a wooden penis like the dolls he loved in the forest.

At the bottom of the trunk, the stepmother discovered
that the Gory Boy left his shadow behind.

Deprived of the skull token, she wore his shadow like a shawl,
draped it over the bloody birthmark
as she gazed at herself in the trunk-lid mirror.

Soon afterward, a group of soldiers
given the task of hunting the wolf pack
blamed for the missing caravans of wealthy travelers,
happened upon the forest clearing
where the ogre sons butchered their victims.

Many soldiers died that day, but after a bloody fight,
they overwhelmed the axes of the brothers.

Their heads on pikes soon lined the road to the castle.

The father disappeared into the forest.

The stepmother, who pleaded ignorance of the ogre deeds,
was consigned to a castle tower for the rest of her days,
all alone with her gypsy trunk.
In the little tower room,
she wasted away before the mirror,
wearing the boy's shadow like a shawl
until he came back to claim it.

Elderly and confused, at first she welcomed
the visit from her long-lost stepson.
As he leaned in to kiss his stepmother,
he gripped a fistful of her iron-gray hair and
vomited gore down her throat until she drowned.

But the boy could not reattach the shadow,
and it slipped away like a playful dog,
always attracted to dolls left too close to mirrors.

And the Gory Boy chases it.

Like Wendy, children find the shadow hiding in their dolls,
but the Gory Boy is never far behind
to claim it again
and murder those who harbor it.

In the darkness of the mirror realm,
The Gory Boy forgot how to use his eyes,
so he holds his head before him like a lantern,
emitting the weird sonar screams he learned
from the vampire bats.

Just like Peter Pan and the Gory Boy,
I lost my shadow too,
and the stitches never took.

Unable to find substance,
my shadow transposed itself
to the underburrows of
(Nightmare/Shadow/Mirror)
where the Queer Shadow Gods
grafted it to the Gory Boy,
a replacement for his mischievous
and fickle shadow.

The marionette specter of my dream mirror,
the Gory Boy,
my shadow Puer Aeternus.

In some incarnations, he wears a suit of bat wings
stitched together with the silk of insectoid gods.

He never grows old, of course;
his beauty is taboo.

All the experts say, never look into a mirror in your dreams.
You might see him there.

The Gory Boy, now nephew to the Queen Witch
Bloody Mary,
often covered with the black mud that
settles at the bottom of the underburrows.

Sometimes clothed in a bright sheet of fresh blood that never dries,
sometimes pictured in artistic representations
with monstrous catfish, the emblem of all bottom dwellers.

The Gory Boy wears a silk bandage
around his throat
to keep his head on, and
when he unwinds it, his neck a geyser of gore.

From The Vampire Bridegroom

Weird Rainbow

Whiteness Consuming

On my fourteenth birthday,
lines of smoke from the candles still waver
like ropes of a vessel in the depth.
The whiteness begins to consume me
like the lower jaw of a fog bank.

The many transformations of the dog after death,
the turning into a representation of my identity.
The obsession with the white dog filled an absence. 

In Junior High I once had a dream about my locker partner turning into my dog.

I remember my locker partner had dark curly hair with an elf face of adolescence and a few dynamic pimples on his nose. I used to tease him a lot. We never played much together outside of school. I lived in a different part of town and rode the bus to school, the kind of barrier that matters to a friendship in Junior High. When I teased him, I called him Gutter Boy. He once got into trouble in algebra for saying "dildo" in front of the whole class. The young female math teacher told him to stop, but he kept repeating the word because he refused to believe it was anything more than a nonsense word, and she refused to define it for him in front of the whole class, which he took as evidence. I knew what it meant. I explained it to him in the hall after class. So I called him Gutter Boy, always telling him his mind was in the gutter. This accusation always accompanied an image in my mind of a nicely washed formaldehyde brain sitting in the dusty gutter by the curb near my house. The irony of the name resulted from the fact that I was the one instigating constant sexual jokes in his presence, not him.

He had lost his right leg to cancer when he was younger. He wore a prosthetic leg with a diaphragm mechanism that allowed him to walk with only a slight limp. He would sometimes play with the air bladder in the mechanism and produce loud farting noises, or he would demonstrate the tremendous force of the mechanism by kicking the locker in the hallway and creating a loud tympanic crash (I'm not sure what the leg was made of--plastic or wood?). He often joked how he could kick an attacker in the crotch, and the force of the prosthetic leg would send the attacker's testicles flying right out of his mouth. He would astound people who didn't know the leg was fake by placing a pencil in the gap in the knee, kicking the leg out, and shattering the pencil into fragments with a surprisingly loud crack. 

But one day I carried the teasing too far, calling him Gutter Boy to the point I upset him and damaged the friendship. I said his leg was hollow because his penis was as huge as a whale's penis and the doctors decided to fill up the hollow leg with it. The teasing went too far that day. He didn't speak to me for hours, and I stopped calling him Gutter Boy after that. 

One night I dreamed about him. We were parked in a car, in the darkness outside the school, almost as if we were on a date, although neither of us were old enough to drive. When he lost his leg, the doctors were also forced to break his sternum and open his chest to remove cancerous pieces of lung. I often noticed a tip of scar tissue peeking up from the collar of his shirt. I wanted to peek behind the shirt to see the scar diagram on his chest. In the dream, I remember him staring into my eyes with that awkward, adolescent face, an intent and confused look. We started kissing. This dream occurred around the time of my first kiss, and the kiss in the dream was a confusion of bumping tongues like a couple of fish in a net attempting to avoid entanglement in the orthodontic brackets and piercing wires of my braces. When I pulled my face back, I discovered I wasn't kissing my locker partner at all. I was kissing my dog. Sometime during the kiss, my locker partner transformed into a white shaggy dog.

Only in a dream can the long snout, jagged formations of teeth, and hot pasty tongue of my dog feel like the mouth of a boy.

The Double

The empty flat plane of the mirror (these images,
scattered reproductions)
in contrast to warm systems of blood and oxygen
under a hood of white hair.

The empty opposite, the zero double
like a mirror of taxidermy--whomever dares
to gaze inside finds themselves represented:
stuffed, posed, and mounted. 

The conflict between the subject and the double
requires a violent re-balancing, a stern correcting
like the misbalance of charged particles in clouds
leads to the strike and horror of the lightning bolt. 

The halves must collide,
but is this integration a healing,
or identical twins knocking their skulls
one upon the other? 

Doubles must collide
and erase.

To what extent does this proliferation of digital images
return the breath of life to the dog
(inhalation/exhalation of ones and zeros--
the crisis of the double in miniature)? 

No more than a representation of a dog
stuffed with industrial particles
or the fiberglass dust of insulation we might breathe in
as we tear apart the double to dig,
to strike through,
to open the doors of her face
for the understanding of this confounding whiteness
(it bleaches; it entangles).

Table Scraps

My genius friend became an Irish Wolfhound
for an experiment.
Something new. Like a vacation.
His long snout wouldn't permit speech,
but he raised his bearded eyebrows knowingly.
He romped in ponds, chasing frogs.
He caught rabbits,
forcing himself to devour them
to complete the primal experience.
Of course, he used the bathroom like
a civilized man,
only finding difficulty with the toilet paper.
He invented cunning games to play
with the neighbor boys,
but I think he liked it too much
when they scratched that irksome spot
behind the ear
and praised him, the ultimate
dog joy.
He stared at the TV, resting on lazy haunches,
awkward paw on the remote control.
He took naps on the lawn, twitching and grumbling
in his nightmares.

And then one day
I caught him squatting in the rose garden.
He wouldn't behave himself at the dinner table
anymore.
He encountered a delicate bitch down the street.
He bit her face; he ripped her ear,
mounting her savagely.
I arrived just in time; I knocked his skull
with a bat and dragged his limp body
to the basement where we waited
for the veterinarian
and her bag of shiny instruments.

His eyes became soft and moist
like the Alpo I scrape from the can.
The children trick him into tail chasing.
Now he pants constantly, without dignity,
always extending a rude, flopping tongue,
pissing on mailboxes to mark a dog's
imaginary territory,
forgetting all of his past identity
in anticipation
of table scraps from the master.
Now he just wants to be a good dog.

Vampire Bridegroom

Here is the title poem from my recent book. This poem originally appeared in Icarus: The Magazine of Gay Speculative Fiction.

Here is "The Vampire Bridegroom" from The Vampire Bridegroom:

For my birthday,
my parents gave me a little vampire
in a hamster cage.
I named him Bram.

I dressed him in that outfit from the
Barbie "Vampire Bridegroom Playset,"
and I slicked back his hair
with shoe polish on my thumb
to accentuate his widow's peak.

I added pinprick blood droplets to his water bottle,
from which he nursed
by licking the silver ball stopper,
all the nourishment he needed.

But during the full moon,
he turned into a little puff of mist and
escaped through the bars,
leaving behind his opera cape and bow tie
on the cedar chips.

You see, my id invited him inside,
unwittingly.
Like a bat seeks out a cave,
the little mist-puff slid up into my rectum while
I slept unaware.

Now the Vampire Bridegroom runs in
the hamster wheel of my heart.

My parents took me to all of the best doctors;
at first the specialists wanted to remove him, of course.

They captured glimpses on the ultrasound
like Bigfoot exposed in a forest clearing.

In the X-rays, they found him nestled behind my
sternum like a papoose,
but when they cracked my chest open in the OR,
they only found his abandoned campfire
and old fingernail clippings.

He must like it there inside me
where it's always night and there's lots of
blood to drink,
where he navigates my innards like
a rabbit in a comfortable warren.

Sometimes he leaves bloody handprints on
the whites of my eyeballs
like a little child on the inside of a
bus window,
to say hello I suppose.

He perches next to my jugular like
a hiker might reflect by a scenic waterfall.

The vampire learned to play my optic nerve
like a friendly uncle might play a banjo string,
and he shows me funny pictures of
Elizabeth Bathory's rubber duckies
and Gilles de Rais playing hide-n-seek
in the castle.

And yes he haunts my
private underworld where
a strawberry patch of strange desires
has sprouted inside my underwear,
and during wet dreams
he rubs my prostate like a zookeeper
might pet a beloved elephant.

The doctors tell me that one day
I will pass him
like a kidney stone,
but I know that the Vampire Bridegroom will sit forever
next to my heart
like a husband next to a plump wife
in the church pew
where he studies me from the inside
like a weaver who controls the loom.

From The Vampire Bridegroom