MIDNIGHT TONIGHT
Midnight tonight
won’t be just any night.
Midnight tonight
will be just right for frights.
The shrivelled mummy
lumbers his doom
from the room in his tomb
to the outer gloom,
unwraps himself like god’s
gift to ghouls.
Vampires and werewolves
and men who are half bulls
wander the maze
of mythical days like fools
stuck in a funhouse.
As for Faust, he summons
the Devil in order
to revel with beautiful girls,
tumbling curls
and long legs included.
Denuded of armour, the hasty
knight swipes at
the hungry dragon who finds
him tasty after a lick
but later the bones will make
him sick. Heartburn!
Every day I learn something
new about the terrors
of specific midnights. Behind
the funeral parlour curtain
there is a monster certain
to pull your head off
if you draw back those drapes.
A witch doctor has arrived
in town, a wizard
in a gown made from toad
skins: he is thin
and radiates weird despair
from the stare
of his sorcerous spiral eyes.
Who among us dares ignore
the wise words
of scholarly mythographers
who caution us
to avoid minotaurs and men
with paws and claws instead
of normal hands?
There are ghosts who love to
spread themselves
thick on the toast of our sixth
sense: we shudder
inexplicably when, wickedly,
they tickle us
spookily right from the inside.
Now I want to talk about the
cobwebbed bottles of black
wine in the cellar where
ape skeletons wear dresses
decayed into tentacular nets,
fibrous, phantasmagorical.
But
let me pause for a moment
to re-read what is written
in these lines…
I think the knight and dragon
in this poem are out of place
among the entities
of gothic nightmare elsewhere
found here. On the
face of things they bring down
the eerie quotient,
ground the horrors in whimsy.
The face of things? A hideous
visage indeed
connected to a grotesque head.
And now I just need to repeat
the first stanza
and we can all go to bed.
Midnight tonight
won’t be just any night.
Midnight tonight
will be just right for frights.
Rhys Hughes has lived in many countries. He graduated as an engineer but currently works as a tutor of mathematics. Since his first book was published in 1995 he has had fifty other books published and his work has been translated into ten languages.
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