Werewolf Sonnets, Vampire Limericks, and Zombie Haiku

If the perfect poetical metaphor for a zombie is, as is popularly held, the haiku, what are the appropriate metaphors for werewolves and vampires?

Obviously, sonnets and limericks.

At enormous personal risk, I have collected these works from a wide array of supernatural sources, often at considerable danger to my own bodily and spiritual integrity.

(Actually, that last part isn’t true. I’ve been on their side since the beginning.)

Available now from Amazon.com is a (new!) wood pulp collection of my various poetry of this peculiar subgenre. Most of what is enclosed have been previously tweeted, WordPressed, or Facebooked, but there are a couple of new ones in there.

Plus, if you pick up a copy you will be the envy of your friends for having the absolute top tier of bathroom reading among all of your social circle.

The Most Dangerous Game

When the Chicago fall began to turn
Into that misdoubted autumnal bite
In desperate straits a hundred bucks to earn
A sleep study I signed up for one night

So I laid down in Chicago but woke
In restraints, strange blood now coursing through me
And others there, too, along with me yoked
Our lupine essence straining to be free

Thereafter upon each full moon’s parade
One of us into the forest was loosed
For sport to be hunted, our flesh sautéed
With our humanity to beast reduced

And although I of all my kind broke free
A beast now doomed to fear of man would I be

Three Months

For three long months I fought the nightly call
To unsheathe skin and let the passions rule
As ambivalent flesh surrendered all
My regrets only proving me the fool

For three long months I shrank from the twilight
Loathe yet to concede that rush and fire
Drowning in a guilt self-served in daylight
My conscience seething on memory’s pyre

For three long months as bones twisted and broke,
As skin wrenched taut and split there to release
Feral joys untempered by wisdom’s yoke
My repletion became a craven peace

Courage thus struck and compunction so lit
Now to ruin, I happily submit

Past Curfew

In the pall of those years now fully spent
Both primitive blessing and profane curse
Where once eager to track that imbrued scent
Now we two that earliest track transverse

Unbitten thus our scion grew older
And to her the lunule grace left untouched
Until that other blooding might claim her
To a sanguine sybariticism clutch

When time proved out the lupine strain bred true
And secured by blood Endymion’s pardon
When from our door she and her date withdrew
Our unease grew as the sunlight softened

Alone, my daughter returned past curfew
“Um Dad, you don’t mind if I borrow the shovel, do you?”

Blood Like Honey

My skin pulled taut upon the tanner’s rack
If that tanner were both sadist and tyrant,
And cords run raw in time to my bones’ crack
Make for a grey and grim reallotment

My veins filled full with liquid fire
Pain tantamount and testament to right,
And if ragged throat to song must retire
Then to a midnight glory will hope ignite

My eyes yet this revelation defy,
A pale blue no wolf could or would claim
And I would that human thread not deny
For in truth, these are but fleshly things renamed

So here, bend ear, and to the moon conceive
The taste of blood like honey for her love receive

Poenari

Lucid memories of that far crossing
Through the Carpathian autumn passage
With mountains steeped in their scarlet hunting
And shy fifteen-hundred stone steps’ vantage

Well I recall now that lonely aerie
The better even than that mad dog’s bite
Though never now can I truly be free
Hounded in life by the moon’s savage light

Though long from Poenari now returned
Distant in time and far remote in reach
From that place I carried a thing unearned
The lupercal passions to my heart preach

If perhaps I might be blameless in this
Forgive me yet this sanguinary kiss

Cruel Favors

He finished his tale and I called him mad
I named him deranged and christened him loon
He stood unflinching, his eyes only sad
Asking of me only one simple boon

The gun, bullets silver in the moonlight,
To wait for the night’s cold malediction
To end there then that fierce claim of the night
And win back there the unferal unction

How could I believe? How could anyone?
But when dusk faded at last into dark
Flesh and bone betrayed sanity’s reason
And my promise found its fateful mark.

When morning broke, the police there found me
By that naked, and oh so very human body.

This My New Season

On that natal night of this my new season
My memory trembles divested of the lies
A naked denial that rejects the sun
And in the canyon a deer beneath me dies

On that second moon of my lunule passion
When human sense fell to lupine intuition
Self-wrought chains fettered wolfen ambition
And for that one night I restrained Mammon

On that third circuit of the lunar maw
Again I set iron to bind nature down
But iron must fail before primitive law
And in the antediluvian frenzy will drown

Submissive no longer to a human regret;
Obedient at last to the primal sunset

The Law of Dispassionate Tooth and Righteous Claw

In the beginning all was reverie
The liberty of untrammeled passion
The mad and the furious and the free
With nothing against that could us threaten

Through streets of ashen grey we ran like dogs
The Sons of Adam, The Daughters of Eve
Their blood and flesh their own last epilogue
Our failure there the crown of the naive

When they came for us it was moonlit night
With dispassionate tooth and righteous claw
They rationed canon upon sybarite
Our reckless blood to feed primeval law

And I, alone, survived that desperate hour
Left to stand mute deed in our fools’ bower

Relationship Blues

A small bloodstained tangle of meat and bone
Like Christmas ribbons scattered on her stoop
Red-decked walls of her beloved brownstone
Her hateful Yorkie now nothing but soup

Perhaps this should be the day I explain
My nocturnal absence every full moon,
That allergy to silver and wolfsbane,
Even what happened to that damned raccoon

Too late now to find gentle rhetoric,
As my fiancée’s steps round the corner
There in my head a plan suddenly clicks,
Recalling a diabolical purr

Her eyes widen in consummate horror,
And I blurt: “I saw your cat off poor Butter!”