Genius Loci
The heath where the Sisters entangled Macbeth
In foggy enchantments of foul seeming fair
Bestirred from a cauldron of bloody ambition
Condensed into spectres of death and perdition
Exists here forever, its dank reeking air
A hint of my soul in the taint of my breath.
The Castle Otranto, its bloodline accursed
Tyrannical cruelty driven to farce
The snares of obsession its falls and its traps
Looms large in the land genealogy maps
Infected with defects the chromosomes pass
To poison the milk of the breast where I nursed.
The Overlook, gaping with cobwebby doors
Where whiskey proved thicker than blood in the end
Its corpses the flotsam of decadent living
Its criminals weak and its trials unforgiving
Is smouldering still with its revenants penned
To sweat out their stink through my venomous pores.
The juice of the fruit of that long ago tree
Was only a catalyst - always within
The knowledge lay waiting: there’s nothing outside
That cannot be twisted from Jekyll to Hyde.
Look not to the landscape for seedbed of sin
The locus is Evil, its genius is me.
Black Magic
The poem is a demon that I summon at my will
His name is legion
I never know the shape he’ll take or what he’ll do until
His bristling black appendages have scuttled forth to spill
Like spiders on this milk-white virgin region.
If Jesus was the Word made flesh my demon’s the reverse
My flesh made word
For all my body suffers or enjoys is to rehearse
The lines of demon limbs that writhe in blessing or in curse
The steaming beast that living’s cauldron stirred.
The horns and hooves and scrabbling claws that scramble through the page
An act of power
Of love, imagination, mischief, wonder, grief and rage
Against the blank indifference of entropy, the cage
Of time and space in which we cringe and cower.
Old Elric’s demon, Stormbringer, an ebon rune-carved blade
That fed on soul
A vampire fang, a drug, the price a white-skinned weakling paid
To be a warrior-emperor, was much the same; it made
The mortal incompleteness darkly whole.
So day by day through simmering years I cast the magic spell
And when it’s done
It’s me who’s casually banished back to bleak entropic hell
The demon roams at large, the joyous legions swarm and swell
And I am glad, for they and I are one.
Dead Dreamer
All space is a pit and all time is a pendulum swinging
The best he conceives is escape from the horrors they’re bringing
Some dream in which palaces glow in the fire of the soul
Some music whose cadence, though strange, is a meaningful whole.
The imp of perversity prompts him to seal his damnation
The eye of the cat a seduction to self-mutilation
For life is a punishment forcing itself towards a crime
Its rhythm depression, revenge its reversionary rhyme.
The line between living and dying no longer exists
Putridity - herein the human condition consists
Unsleeping, unwaking, suspended in coffined decay
The malady endless, a hideous dropping away.
Thus suffering, guilt and morbidity blacken his tales
But genius succeeds where a faith in humanity fails
For Poe was an actor, each horror a harshly schooled part
The play made sublime by the torturous whole of his art.
Imagine these words were not written but cut
So the blackness you see is not ink
It’s darkness, the dark of the white page’s gut
And you peer through the lettering’s chink
Down a throat that’s more deep than you think
Where the boldest imaginings sink.
The words that we speak are a carving on skin
And a glimpse of the depths they reveal
Gives only a hint of the black zone within
Where our thoughts flow and pool and congeal
In the throb of the things that we feel
Like a wound with the body as weal.
The Word that was God was a gouge in the void
And the cosmos it left bears the scar:
That darkness that gapes, unannealed, unalloyed
On the page of creation’s bright star.
But that darkness is vaster by far
Than the light, and it’s all that we are.
What Dreams Become
Descending slowly, seaborne into sleep
My thoughts adapt to darkness far below
The courses where the daytime fish-thoughts leap.
The depths dictate new shapes for them to grow.
Down here beyond the wavering seaweed fields
The discourse of the brain dissolves away
In jabberwocky synergy which yields
More meanings than the waking self can say.
These meanings take on forms increasing strange
As hidden pressures squeeze and bulge them through
An alchemy of swift-evolving change
All flowing soft and smooth as molten glue.
The glowing dream things swim above a chasm
A plumbless ocean trench within the mind
To glimpse which is to waken with a spasm
And leave the thought-deforming depths behind.
I fear one night the pull of that black hole
Will suck my dreamings down and down to where
The awful pressure at the core of soul
Is more than even shapes of dream can bear.
Imploding matter finds another space
In anti-matter’s zone; if so, it seems
There ought to be a corresponding place
As refuge for annihilated dreams.
So maybe you will see, though I be dead
What dreams become when dreaming drags them deeper
And marvel at what sprawls upon the bed
When shape of dream has stolen flesh of sleeper.
Simon MacCulloch lives in London. His poems live 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, I Become the Beast, Lovecraftiana, Awen and elsewhere.
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