Vicious Romantic

Wrath James White

Published by Needfire Poetry

~An imprint of Belfire Press~

Box 295

Miami, MB

R0G 1H0

Copyright © 2010 Wrath James White

Edited by Rich Ristow

Cover & Interior Art by Bob Freeman

Interior Design by Jodi Lee

ISBN: 978-1-926912-29-5

Kindle Ebook/Digital Download

A catalogue record for this title is available from the

National Library of Canada.

This collection of poetry are works of fiction. Any resemblance to place, person or event is strictly coincidental.

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Amazon.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of these authors.

Belfire Press – http://www.belfirepress.com

* * * *

Also By Wrath James White

Teratologist (with Edward Lee) - 2002 Medium Rare Books

Poisoning Eros (with Monica O’Rourke) - 2003

Succulent Prey - 2005 Bloodletting Books

The Book of A Thousand Sins - 2005 Two-Backed Books

His Pain - 2007 Delirium Books

Hero (with J.F. Gonzalez) - 2008 Bloodletting Books

Orgy of Souls (with Maurice Boaddus) - 2008 Apex Books

Sloppy Seconds - 2008 Skullvines Press

Succulent Prey - 2008 Leisure Books

Population Zero - 2008 by Cargo Cult Books

The Resurrectionist - 2009 Leisure Books

Yaccub’s Curse - 2009 Necro Books

* * * *

Acknowledgements

Special Thanks to Rich Ristow for having the vision to see this thing through all the obstacles and setbacks from start to finish. To Linda Addison, Tom Piccirilli and Rain Graves for keeping verse alive in the genre for all of these years and reawakening my own love of poetry. To Ted Hechtman for making me believe in the power of poetry ( I will never forget those nights sipping champagne and reading aloud the latest products of the muse.) And to Monica O'Rourke, Maurice Broaddus, and Brian Keene for things too numerous to mention. A very special thanks to my wife, Christie, for always being there to read my work and support even my craziest ideas.

Dedication

To Mom.

* * * *

About the Poet

Wrath James White is a former World Class Heavyweight Kickboxer, a professional Kickboxing and Mixed Martial Arts trainer, distance runner, performance artist, and former street brawler, who is now known for creating some of the most disturbing works of fiction in print.

Wrath’s two most recent novels are The Resurrectionist and Yaccub’s Curse. He is also the author of Succulent Prey, The Book of a Thousand Sins, His Pain, and Population Zero. He is the co-author of Teratologist with the king of extreme horror, Edward Lee, Orgy of Souls co-written with Maurice Broaddus, Hero co-written with J.F. Gonzalez, and Poisoning Eros co-written with Monica J. O'Rourke.

Wrath lives and works in Austin, Texas with his two daughters, Isis and Nala, his son Sultan and his wife Christie.

* * * *

Table of Contents

Introduction

A Note on Poetic White Space

A Note From the Publisher

Necropolis

House of Murderers

Sijo (1)

Not His Mother

The Wind Over The Water

Forgiveness

Sijo (2)

Trinkets

The Cycle of Victims

A Teen Mother’s Sorrow

Consumption

Wendigo

This Old House of Pain and Woe

The Rapturous Scent of Meat

Hunter’s Moon

Alpha and Omega

Just Like Whores

Vicious Romantic

* * * *

Introduction

To explain this collection, I need to explain a little about myself. To many people, even those who know me best, I am an enigma, a collection of incongruent parts that make no sense when assembled but still manage somehow to function in concert. I am a kid who grew up fighting on the streets of Philadelphia, a kickboxer and boxer who reads and writes horror fiction, philosophy, and poetry, and a hardworking family man who adores his wife and kids. I am a genuinely nice guy and a lecherous pervert who writes some of the most twisted psychosexual horror ever put into print and won’t shy away from a street fight or bar room brawl. These attributes and personality traits would seem to conflict with one another. Yet, they coexist within me in complete harmony. They give me balance. This collection, horror poetry written in Japanese and Korean formal structures, is likewise a combination that may seem incongruous at first but yet is completely harmonious. It makes sense if you know me.

I have always loved horror. I used to lie at the foot of my mother’s bed on Saturday afternoons watching Creature Double Feature on an old black and white television, infatuated by the monsters and ghouls raging across the small flickering screen. By age twelve, I was reading every Stephen King book I could get my hands on. I knew, even then, that I wanted to be a horror author. By age fourteen, I was writing almost as much as I was reading, churning out story after story of madness and death.

At age fifteen, I had my first heartbreak and instantly, typically, became a poet. Like all young tortured poets I wrote angst-ridden tales of heartache and woe. I still wrote horror stories but there was nothing like a melodramatic poem to soothe my romantic soul. After submitting and rejecting my first horror story at age seventeen, I did not submit another story for nearly thirteen years, and oh how I wish I had those years to do over again. But though I didn’t write much horror during that time period, I wrote a shit ton of poetry.

I competed in spoken word poetry contests and poetry slams. I read poetry on MTV’s The Real World. I performed live with Gil Scott-Heron and The Last Poets. I had a group consisting of a flutist, a conga player, and a painter. I read poetry to their music while my good friend, an immensely talented visual artist named Norm Maxwell, painted his interpretation of my words on a huge canvas in the background. I performed spoken word performance art in the nude while being oiled from head to toe. I read poetry while whipping a leather-clad woman onstage to the sound of drums. I even read poetry as part of a hip-hop group. I did everything I could think to do with poetry. Then I started writing horror again and I put poetry on a back burner… until now.

This collection combines my love of poetry with my love of horror. Some of these poems are quiet and some quite extreme. A few of these poems I would consider some of the most haunting and genuinely spooky words I have ever written—horror of the campfire ghost story variety. This collection is also richly flavored by my love of Asian culture and particularly its art and poetry.

My love of Japanese poetry began my first year in college when I was a creative writing major with an emphasis on poetry. Before eventually switching my major to philosophy, I took a class titled Writing and Interpreting Japanese Poetry. Although I was already familiar with haiku this course introduced me to new forms like choka and tanka. I fell in love with these poetic forms almost instantly. I found their rigid disciplined structure perfectly complimented the rigid discipline of my life as a martial artist. It was no longer a mystery to me why samurai wrote poetry.

For those unfamiliar with Japanese poetry, these poems may require some explanation. Many of the poems contained within are haiku, three line poems consisting of five syllables, seven syllables, and a final line of five syllables. What I have done with most of them is to arrange them in such a way that when read one after another they form one cohesive poem yet they can still stand alone as individual pieces. Not an easy task. As a result, this collection contains as few as eighteen poems and as many as sixty or more depending on how it is read.

In The Wind Over the Water, I took some liberties with the form, creating my own hybrid consisting of five syllables followed by two lines seven syllables each. I took some other liberties as well in terms of theme and content. Traditional haiku center around nature. These poems, however, are about terror, madness, pain and sorrow, though I did try to center many of them in natural settings.

In addition to haiku this collection contains a form of Japanese poetry called a choka which consists of alternating lines of five and seven syllables ending with two final lines each with seven syllables. This type of poetry is the only classical Japanese form that is open in length, sometimes containing as many as 50 to 100 lines. Its shorter form, the tanka, is five lines of verse arranged five syllables followed by seven syllables followed by five syllables followed by two lines each with seven syllables just like a choka. Not His Mother, Consumption, and Alpha and Omega are examples of the tanka.

There is one other form you will find in this collection that is not Japanese at all but Korean in origin. It is called a sijo. Rich Ristow introduced me to this form thinking it would make a nice addition to the collection. Though the structure of a sijo is not quite as rigid as a haiku or a tanka, it does have a very definite and precise almost lyrical meter. In fact, sijo were written to be sung, though I wouldn’t recommend trying to sing This Old House of Pain and Woe or Hunter’s Moon. A sijo is three lines of verse between fifteen and seventeen syllables each. Each line can be further broken down into four lines of three to five syllables. This collection contains my first and only attempts at this form though they will not likely be my last. My thanks to Rich for bringing sijo to my attention.

So why tackle such challenging forms when free verse is by far easier and more popular? That would be like asking me why I fight instead of playing basketball, or run marathons instead of riding a couch with a video controller in one hand a beer in the other, or why I write horror when it would be easier to write romance or to get a nine to five. I do it precisely because it is not easy, because it is a challenge that not every swinging dick can meet and because I love it. Every word, every syllable, was a labor of love. I hope you will love it too.

Wrath James White

* * * *

A Note on Poetic White Space

You cannot vomit words onto a page and call it poetry. There’s a popular misconception that poetry is an art of “anything goes,” irrespective of cultural traditions. Even post-modernism and the current avant garde has its antecedents going back more than a century. Yet, no matter the tradition, or the form poetry takes, there’s a certain aesthetic overriding. A sense of the line, and how the line functions, is vastly important. Some more formal prosodies work off of metrical or syllabic counts—the line is fixed to a certain amount of sounds. More open prosodies, like free verse, leave systematic considerations open to the poet, but it largely comes down to how the poet structures their line, and how the line breaks. This is why, as Ezra Pound once famously noted, that you can’t take good prose and hack it into lines. Consider:

There was an eyeball floating in my beer.

Gruesome—nothing remotely “poetic” about it. However, consider:

There

Was

An

Eyeball

Floating

In

My

Beer.

It’s still not a “poem.” Broken lines do not change its nature as a sentence. Besides there being a one word per line, there’s no logic to its organization. And, there’s an unseen force at work here, one making this fail as a poem.

That force is called “poetic white space.” It’s a concept that is highly important to the book you’re holding. First, allow me to explain it, before I explain how it relates to Vicious Romantic.

Prose runs from margin to margin, filling out the page. Lineated poetry doesn’t. Depending on how it’s formatted, there’s a lot more open page. It acts like a weight. That extra white space exerts pressure on the line and language of a poem from all sides, and it draws out the effect of the language, and depending on how open page space is used, it can enhance or detract.

Here’s how that touches Wrath’s work. Wrath and I worked out an agreement where page breaks would go after many of his poem’s stanzas. So, The Wind on the Water may be string of haiku, but each individual part has been given its own page. This is a deliberate use of poetic white space. Wrath and I agreed it would be an effective tool to give more emphasis to the imagery and emotion of the individual parts of the poems. Plus, it lets each stanza stand by itself in its own right, while building off what came before. It deliberately slows the reader down, whereas if a reader was presented with two to three poems per page, the reader would rush through it quicker.

Rich Ristow

Editor - Needfire Poetry

* * * *

A Note From the Publisher

To fully enjoy this awe-inspiring collection of poetry, one really needs to see it in the format it was meant to be in, that of the printed page. In converting these words to digital medium, we have had to lose one of the very means by which the poet has chosen to show us his art - we have had to remove a great deal of the white space that was intended to heighten the impact of the poetry.

Jodi Lee, Publisher

Needfire Poetry - Belfire Press

* * * *

Necropolis

A garbage-strewn street

Littered with glass and cigarettes

Where curses resound

Promises die unfulfilled

The dreams of youth are martyred

In this corrupt place

Reeking of semen and blood

The real monsters live

Demons of all description

In a comfortable new hell

* * * *

House of Murderers

The echo of screams

In this place where children died

Live in these cracked walls

Their voices weaken

Waning with the light of day

Whispers in twilight

In costumes of skin

Demons with candy sweet smiles

Hunt the darkened halls

Phantoms cry warning

As an innocent enters

This house of murder

The foundation quakes

With the voices of the damned

As more blood is spilled

A flash of violence

Adds another victim’s cries

To the dark chorus of screams

* * * *

Sijo (1)

Festering sick and feverish,

Putrefying eternally lamenting

His lost humanity, pounds of flesh

Sloughing away

He lies amid carrion,

Witnessing civilization’s end

* * * *

Not His Mother

He knows right away

This marionette of meat

Is not his mother

It smiles with unfeeling eyes

As it lunges for his throat

He sheds a lone tear

Loads his shotgun with a shell

Full of penny nails

He hesitates a moment

Fingernails claw his windpipe

Looking in her eyes

He sees her as she once was

She who gave him birth

And in that fatal instance

Decides to join her in hell

* * * *

The Wind Over The Water

Tiny waves ripple

On the algae green water

A man-made lake for tourists

Joggers pass swiftly

Walkers stroll leisurely by

Children splash in the water

Young couples embrace

And whisper to each other

Making promises of love

Rain clouds choke the sun

The last light struggles for life

As night overcomes the day

Alone in shadows

Untouched by love or beauty

A monster’s eyes hunt the lake

Slowly the joggers

The walkers and the lovers

Leave the lake for the city

A boy sits alone

Abandoned in the twilight

Tears cascading from his eyes

A Goodbye letter

Torn apart and burnt to ash

Blows from his trembling fingers

Across the listless waters

The sun drops lower

Shadows turn the water black

The sky a Stygian tomb

A strong wind stirs the waters

The boy lifts his tear soaked face

Up to the darkening sky

His wet cheeks sparkle

Like diamonds in the moonlight

By the lake, a monster waits

The promise of prey

Fantasies of blood and pain

Dissolve all hesitation

Strong, dry, calloused hands

Crush tight around the boy’s throat

A knife cuts into his back

Heavy panting breaths

Quicken in the young man’s ear

As his life falls prey to lust

Down between his thighs

The monster strokes his turgid flesh

Hands lubricated with blood

One last little death

Spurts out red into the lake

As he feels the boy’s pulse fade

Darkness devours

The shell of blood, meat and bone

That had once shed silent tears

Over unrequited love.

* * * *

Forgiveness

Among the tall weeds

Out of the mouth of a skull

A rose grows and blooms

She plants a new one each day

To say she’s sorry

Her apology withers

In the blood soaked earth

And the unforgiving sun

Where love gasped its dying breath

* * * *

Sijo (2)

Her belly ruptures full of parasites,

Her eyes sink back in her skull

Her butchered wrists, dangle

From the edge of the bathtub

Her children cuddle against her

Desperate for love she cannot give

* * * *

Trinkets

A gold wedding band

Sparkling in a nearby field

Reflects the harsh summer sun

A gold crucifix

Dented and spattered in blood

Dangles from a cracked ribcage

Bleaching in the sun

Blessed symbols of his faith

In love and savior

Covered in swarms of vermin

Picking his bones clean

Maggots, ants, rats, coyotes

Return him to dust

Talismans of love and faith

Now consigned to the desert

* * * *

The Cycle of Victims

It sinks its teeth deep

Its corruption penetrates

I can’t stop smiling

I watch stoically

As it tears her flesh apart

Waiting for my turn

Raindrops smear the blood

As it washes down my face

Into my cupped palms

I drink deep of it

Suck out its bitter marrow

Continuing the cycle

* * * *

A Teen Mother’s Sorrow

She wore her sorrow

Like a Halloween fright mask

Grimacing in pain

Frizzy brittle hair

Ebon tears blacken her cheeks

Lipstick smears her mouth

Ulcerating sores

Weep pus and blood down her arms

Her secret disease

A cancerous guilt

Metastasized within her

She stumbles forward

Drooling saliva

Mumbling, cursing, and scratching

“Where is my baby?”

A ghost haunts her eyes

Suppressed memories of guilt

“Where is my baby?”

The night wind whispers

Blowing trash down dark alleys

Chasing poltergeists

An unwanted soul

A baby in a trashbag

Discarded refuse

Smiling up at her

Through unmoving moldy eyes

Covered in garbage

Smiling up at her

Wet with amniotic blood

Rigid with rigor

Smiling up at her

From the bottom of the bin

Where she left his infant corpse

* * * *

Consumption

Like warm sashimi

Paper-thin slices of you

Cut so lovingly

Melt like butter on my tongue

It is the taste of beauty

* * * *

Wendigo

Winter currents blow

A ballet of ice crystals

Pirouette to earth

In the frigid night

A howl of desperate hunger

Chills the blood with bitter fear

A rustling of leaves

Something charges through the brush

Across a snow covered yard

Clawed feet rake the snow

Saliva drips like acid

From fangs stained with meat

A vicious nightmare

Walking upright like a man

Approaches the house

Outside the window

Its hot breath steaming the pane

The nightmare watches

The window shatters

As it comes for him

And savagely unmakes him

Muscle ripped from bone

Limbs torn from his torso

Screams fracture the night

Snowflakes drift softly

Blow through the shattered window

Alight gently on his corpse

And dissolve in pools of blood

* * * *

This Old House of Pain and Woe

This old house of pain and woe, tortured beams,

splintered wood, cry out in rage

Floorboards bleed, windows weep, poltergeists

shriek

Threats at the living

She covers her ears against the madness,

then adds her screams to the din

* * * *

The Rapturous Scent of Meat

Buried with the snakes

Skin covered in black widows

A pile of corpses

The unlucky ones

The tricks, gamblers and whores

The lonely tourists

Claw up through the hard dry earth

Through their own remains

Recalling their sins

Forgetting recent failures

Seduced by the lights

They stagger toward the neon

Stronger than remorse

The rapturous scent of meat

The need for release

Draws them out of the desert

To try their luck once again

* * * *

Hunter’s Moon

Savage black eyes, coarse hair,

A smile full of razors

Muscles taunt and straining, fists clenched,

Jaw locked tight snarling

The moon turns black, a scent of sex,

A predator roars before the hunt

* * * *

Alpha and Omega

One final sunrise

For the last human on earth

Warms his trembling flesh

At peace with oblivion

He watches them come for him

* * * *

Just like Whores

He laughed at her fangs

And at her bloodless pallor

Who still believes in Vampires?

She was beautiful

A romantic dream of death

In satin and lace

Sensuous killer

Powdered corseted bosom

Cleavage splashed with red

Her black lipstick smile

Pouting like a spoiled child

Full lips like bloated leeches

Leonine canines

Rancid like an abattoir

From her last Romeo’s blood

He offered his throat

Let her drink just a little

One small taste of life

He watched her imbibe

Grotesquely slurping

Watched it trickle from her lips

Dripping down her throat

Between her lovely pale breasts

Licking her fingers

So very lovely

His blood on her swollen lips

His first vampire

So very lovely

He would have to remember

Each salacious cut

He took her slowly

Bled her of secrets and screams

He smiled contemplating

That vampires bled just like whores.

* * * *

Vicious Romantic

A bed full of flesh

Crawling with flies and maggots

Old empty wallets

Dried roses and Valentines

Melted chocolates swirled with blood

Hungry for romance

The creature licks its fingers

Its stomach rumbles

It sprays musky pheromones

Compliments, lies, and perfume

It sings a love song

While stalking desperate lovers

Eager for the kill

It camouflages itself

As diamond engagement rings

* * * *

Table of Contents

Introduction

A Note on Poetic White Space

A Note From the Publisher

Necropolis

House of Murderers

Sijo (1)

Not His Mother

The Wind Over The Water

Forgiveness

Sijo (2)

Trinkets

The Cycle of Victims

A Teen Mother’s Sorrow

Consumption

Wendigo

This Old House of Pain and Woe

The Rapturous Scent of Meat

Hunter’s Moon

Alpha and Omega

Just Like Whores

Vicious Romantic

* * * *

* * * *

* * * *

* * * *