Shadwell Stair

I am the ghost of Shadwell Stair.
Along the wharves by the water-house,
And through the cavernous slaughter-house,
I am the shadow that walks there.

Yet I have flesh both firm and cool,
And eyes tumultuous as the gems
Of moons and lamps in the full Thames
When dusk sails wavering down the pool.

Shuddering the purple street-arc burns
Where I watch always; from the banks
Dolorously the shipping clanks
And after me a strange tide turns.

I walk till the stars of London wane
And dawn creeps up the Shadwell Stair.
But when the crowing syrens blare
I with another ghost am lain.

Wilfred Owen

NOTE:
This poem first drafted at Scarborough between January and February 1918, was revised in July or August prior to Owen’s death. Its message is cryptic, bound up with Owen’s sexuality and his association with gay literary figures such as Robert Ross, Osbert Sitwell and Charles Scott Moncrieff (translator of Marcel Proust) who, along with Siegfried Sassoon, were doing much to further Owen’s career as a poet.

eerie and fantastic

Moonlight made a ghostly path for me, and shadows, eerie and fantastic, lurked behind the trees.

Daphné du Maurier
My Cousin Rachel

a strange new street

BUT JUST before sleep, there must be ,an unguarded moment when the mind is cut off from the will power and seeks its own paths. My mind went to THE BOOK OF AMBROSE. Out of memory marched certain words I’d read therein. And with them came , a strange warmth.

“…The possibilities of pleasure in the human form can be realized only, according to the worshippers, by cultivated adoration of the All-Dark. Complete’ submission to the Prince is signified by acknowledging his sovereignty automatically in the potent and rewarding fields. The King of Lust. The Emperor of Desire. The prayers. “Madarng phalanatus ladion. Mishabwa! Mishabiua! Mishabwa!”

There was a strange, terrifying rhythm to the prayer. I’d read it but once; yet I knew it perfectly. I wondered what Mishabwa meant. It rang through my mind to the accompaniment of little silver bells and –

I was walking up a strange new street – not of dreams but tangible; as real and solid as awakening in the morning and going to sleep at night. So real as to make me cringe with embarrassment at the things around me. This was a narrow street lined with old houses of red brick. There were tiny gardens in front of each house and the gardens had been watered because it was the morning of a summer day. The air was perfumed with the smell of new water and thirsty plants. But there was a sweeter, more feverish thirst in the air, a warming aura which plucked each nerve in my body with a tingling anticipation – of what? I knew what. By all the Black Arts I knew what!

Ivar Jorgensen
Rest in Agony

Virginity

I’d like to think that I took my own virginity
One tired night in my closet with my vibrating toothbrush
I told Marques that he was my first
Along with Caleb
and Alex
and Francisco
and Ashlyn
Even when I was 13 and I discovered the wonder that was (and is)
my vagina, I figured that my virginity should be mine.
My vagina is special to me.
It grants me the delicious explosion if I talk to it just right
I fall in love with myself a little more each time I caress it.
The bond that I have with my vagina will never be broken.
My virginity is in fact
mine

Olive Waverly

A woman’s screams behind the door…

Just before 11 his gloved fist hammered on the door of 1977 Arkansas Avenue, the last known address of Bud and Bubba, the self-styled ‘Backwoods Bastards’. He knew he was in luck when he heard Bubba’s muffled voice yelp ‘It’s the pizza boy!’ excitedly.

A woman’s screams could also be heard from behind the door. When Bubba’s broken-nosed, wall-eyed, bucktoothed face appeared in front of him, he yelled “You’re the pizza, boy!” and shot him in the face.

Damn! It seemed he was addicted to his one-liners but his timing was off – the gunshot stamped all over that last one. “I should have read more comic books when I was young,” he thought.

He stepped inside. The place was in darkness – the brothers had never acquired the knack of using electricity. Suddenly, off to one side, he caught a flash of Bud coming at him with a home-made machete. He spun quickly and blew Bud’s face off, thinking it a big improvement; he was even uglier than his brother.

In the bedroom a young woman was tied to the bed. She was bleeding from her nose and two fingers were missing from her left hand. He didn’t care to think what other horrors she had suffered at the hands of those two inbred hillbillies.

He wrapped her in a blanket and called the police before jumping back into his car and streaking off into the fog-wreathed night once more.

Mark Howard Jones
The Man who killed Halloween

Pussy Licking

the coldest cock I’ve ever tasted

“I didn’t first fuck him, I sucked his cock,” she said, before ordering another round for both of us. She lit another Salem and added, “It was the coldest cock I’ve ever tasted. I sucked it long and hard for nearly twenty minutes, even breaking a sweat. It still tasted like a fudge sickle. And he didn’t even come, which bummed me out; cold heart, cold cock, minus the cold cum, the formula shall remain tragically incomplete.”

Chris Benton
Uber-Death Translator

the monstrous Eyeless-Thing

Far to my right, away up among inaccessible peaks, loomed the enormous bulk of the great Ass-god. Higher, I saw the hideous form of the dread goddess, rising up through the red gloom, thousands of fathoms above me. To the left, I made out the monstrous Eyeless-Thing, grey and inscrutable. Further off, reclining on its lofty ledge, the livid ghoul-Shape showed- a splash of sinister colour, among the dark mountains.

William Hope Hodgson
The House on the Borderland

Sunday morning pleasure

To achieve true happiness you must risk being torn apart…

Men are strange. One minute they love you, offer you everything they have – their soul, their life, just everything. Then when you accept their kind offer, they take it all back. They beg and plead and tell you they were looking for something else. Honest to God they were. But by then, of course, it’s too damn late…

I took a deep, deep breath of you. And now I’m going to hold it for as long as I can. Forever, maybe…

The world beyond this room simply doesn’t exist…

Omens

The dead bird, colour of a bruise,
and smaller than an eye
swollen shut,
is king among omens.
Who can blame the ants for feasting?
Let him cast the first crumb.
#
We once tended the oracles.
Now we rely on a photograph
a fingerprint
a hand we never saw
coming.
#
A man draws a chalk outline
first in his mind
around nothing
then around the body
of another man.
He does this without thinking.
#
What can I do about the white room I left
behind? What can I do about the great stones
I walk among now? What can I do
but sing.
Even a small cut can sing all day.
#
There are entire nights
I would take back.
Nostalgia is a thin moon,
disappearing
into a sky like cold,
unfeeling iron.
#
I dreamed
you were a drowned man, crown
of phosphorescent, seaweed in your hair,
water in your shoes. I woke up desperate
for air.
#
In another dream, I was a field
and you combed through me
searching for something
you only thought you had lost.
#
What have we left at the altar of sorrow?
What blessed thing will we leave tomorrow?

Cecilia Llompart