Scenes from a Seventies Cellar Sofa

By: Hunter Christian 

Within the mind of a madman swirled
The faint belief he could live in this world
The haunting bloodline to which he was bequeathed
The bodies decaying, buried beneath

The rickety shack where his plans are hatched
The tin roof, the holes newly patched
The scent of jasmine, of pungent death
Smothered his palette with every breath

On the walls hanged rosaries upon plaster unevenly thatched
The patchwork quilt; the tiles, the stitching that never matched
The tools of his trade, so readily made
His mother's love, the love his father forbade

Swirling, swimming, diver down goes the wretched
Into the murky pond, the bones he wade into fetch it
It that cathartically racked his addled mind
It that lost time when the watch would not wind
It that stepped from the shadows to the fore, from behind

The cardboard box held steadfast with twine
His deadly vocation; its haunting evocation
The blood on the carpet seeped deep into the knotted pile
The higher the pile, the deeper defiled

Stained crimson the warf, as stained crimson the woof
Awash by moonbeams scattered through cracks in the roof
So many lives unavenged lay in shallow graves

The woman who smiles, the child who waves
The man who hitched a fatal final ride
Another woman who smiled, while yet another cried,
"Don't kill me sir, I will give you anything I can"!

“Bother me not, do you know who I am?
I am the reaper, the scythe, the cloak, and the wrath
The Merchant of Venice bathing in a crimson bloodbath
The pale horse canter along your mortal bridle path”

The rosaries, the moonbeams, the cutter that is the lath
Wind howls, it bellows, it droops as it coughs
From the madman's larynx emanates a loud guffaw
The blood that drips from his menacing jaw

Within the mind of the madman your fate thus swirled
Stealing your breath's last known to this world
Awakening from the dreamscape where around you lay curled
The madman you feared was nothing more; than your loving dream girl