Unspeakable Horror!

Here is a new horror poem that I recently read at Village Books:

The Magic Dog Leash and the Mad Snake Bomber

Chad writes the Magic Dog Leash.

The white bangs over the sheepdog’s eyes,
a veil.
Clicking nails on linoleum floor.
Black nose on a white snout
like a snowman's eye.

Chad writes the Magic Dog Leash,
feeds Panda the brown nuggets in the porcelain bowl.

Inside the strong box;
It is the locked box.

Inside the Purple Box.

The white paw-print on the purple lid;
white finger-paint on a dog’s paw.

White paw-print on a purple box;
the gateway between story worlds,
a purple portal.

Chad walks Panda through the snow.

Here in this story world where
flatulent vampires haunt the shadows,
where Satan drives a purple van,
where young boys discover the curse
of the werewolf in the locker room.

The Adventures of The Magic Dog Leash:

The television cracks;
the television spills out ideas.
The television cracks
like an aquarium filled with bottom feeders
that evolved outside natural selection,
a rift between story worlds,
between memory and fantasy.
The television cracks;
the television spills out a twisted reality
like a leak from a madman’s mind.

Chad writes the Magic Dog Leash,
but in the night,
a sleeping hand drops a cigarette
on the pages;
smoke and fire release the monsters in the manuscript;
the sleepers in the house
breathe the monsters in like spirits:
smoke inhalation occupation.

Chad writes the Magic Dog Leash;
now: a multifaceted world, a hall of mirrors
like many pages, each a face
in the manuscript.
Ice crystals branching.

Chad meddles with the cable box,
tampers with the screws: a recipe
for free forbidden movie channels, but instead
it ruptures the seal of the story world,
and the horror movies escape.

Chad writes the Magic Dog Leash,
but something cracks open.

Boxes violated.
Graves discovered.
Pandora is assumed into the text.
A purple box with a white paw-print.
A television screen cracks while a werewolf
salivates, waits for the opening to grow.
The lid left open
on a terrarium housing
unspeakable arachnids.
A psychopathic brain-in-a-jar emits
telepathic instructions.
The ax maniac removes his mask,
and the demon in his mind goes shopping
for a new host.
The heart of a vampire
sprouts tentacles like an octopus
and escapes into the lake.
An evil reflection gains mastery
and slips out from behind the mirror.
The zombie smashes the lid of its pine box.
The reader opens this book.
The white veil pulled back.
The door to the purple van opens
(the white paw-print painted on the side).

Young Chad writes The Magic Dog Leash,
a tale of a boy and his sheepdog, Panda.

The dense hair-veil over the eyes.
The whiteness of erasure.
The terror of whiteness.
Lost in the fog.
The fog spills from the madman’s mind.
Boiling sea foam when the monstrous white blob arises
from the depth.
The panic of the white-out blizzard.
Drowning in milk.
Chad transforms into the dog again.

Here in this drama,
biography and fantasy converge.

Satan opens his copy of the book.

Chad walks Panda over the ice.

The ice vampires reach up through the ice, pull boys into the portal beneath, the inverse of a polar bear nabbing a seal. The ice vampires proliferate in small Colorado towns. When a heavy snowfall begins to thaw, but then freezes again at twilight, the portals of the ice vampires materialize in ice-covered parking lots or cul-de-sacs, wherever ice covers large stretches of asphalt undisturbed. Like landmines, quicksand pits, and trapdoor spiders, the portal of the ice vampire is invisible to the unsuspecting prey.

Chad and Panda navigate the ice on the cul-de-sac.

Chad touches himself on the waterbed that his parents purchase as a gift for his twelfth birthday, inadvertently activating the curse of the waterbed.

The waterbed demon is born inside the warm sloshing fluid.
It waits for an accident,
a tear in the waterbed,
or for someone to forget the screw-top lid on the refill spout.
Until this happens,
the creature must satiate its thirst
by inserting the long mosquito needle
up through the semi-permeable membrane
of the waterbed mattress
as the creature progresses through its life-cycle
from parasitic tadpole to four-legged carnivorous monster.

Chad writes the Magic Dog Leash,
doodles ancient occult symbols in the manuscript
and unlocks a sequence,
keys the portal.

The box is opened;
the top is left off.

When Art, Chad's father, gets laid off from the top-secret chemical plant
and his beloved wife volunteers for a research expedition
to the center of the earth,
Art locks himself in the windowless basement,
uses his vast chemical expertise to breed hybrid poisons,
and strange explosive compounds
that respond to human emotion.
The devices soon follow;
bombs that detonate in the presence of fear,
but not just any fear:
the primordial fear of snakes.
Art becomes the Mad Snake Bomber.

The box is opened:
see the snake coiled around the detonator.

Chad conquers the Vampire King in the Magic Dog Leash,
discovers that vampires love vampire movies.

Chad discovers that all vampires must tell the truth;
they must respond to all polite questions.

When the boy detectives (Chad and his best friend Richard) discover
the crate of earth in the abandoned boat-house beneath the dusty purple-black tarp,
they open the box.
The master vampire is there:
his tuxedo shirt is unbuttoned,
which exposes an open flap of flesh next to the sternum
like the lid of a box.
The vampire’s heart had escaped into the waters of the lake
where it sprouts tentacles and attacks fallen water skiers.

To build his purple mail-bomb snake packages,
Art places a catalog order for a mixed variety of snakes.
Of course, when you order large shipments of mixed snakes
haphazardly,
demons in snake-disguise will infiltrate the mix.

The demon-snake escapes from its basement cage, coils beneath Chad's warm pillow, reads his dreams like a mammal suckles.

Playing fetch with Panda in the back yard, the demon-snake strikes from beneath the shadows of an old stump, but Chad catches the snake by its hooded throat.

Now the snake must grant the boy one wish: the snake-demon transforms into the Magic Dog Leash.

Chad and Panda fly across the sky which drowns in twilight.