THE CLOCK DEMON
The demon in the clock
haunted the early hours
of the heir
to an estate
so old that
all the hate
of countless generations
had faded
to a murmur in the walls.
The face behind the dial
was as melancholy, vile,
as the iron
crocodile
in the room
below the
passage where the gloom
had grown
much louder than a shout.
But this demon was silent
throughout the long nights
of winter
when the
freezing
mansion
reversed a grim expansion,
wheezing
in a manner not displeasing.
The clock: it is a guardian,
charged by aeons archean,
to chime
to death
the heir
bearing
ghoulish responsibilities
nowhere
without ceremonial fury.
They claim the creature
trapped there, not daring
to beware
will stare
at forever
resentfully
until those who truly care
decimate
the new legions of eternity.
And still the hours pass,
the demon tries a laugh,
cascading
the shades
of certain
odd hues
into a tone that you alone
will adore
if cosmic doors slam shut.
THE BEGGAR
The beggar
remembers a time
when he drank the rarest
wine from a goblet
and sprawled
on a couch, eyes hooded.
Then one day
an uninvited guest
arrived at his house, worn out,
a man in rags,
eyes ablaze, his tongue hanging
like a vast flatworm
from the lower lip of a blistered
mouth: or like a flag
drooping from a derelict ship
one evil afternoon.
The stars had shuddered
over him: the moon had juddered
high like the jawbone
of a slain man, crescent shattered
by a twisted club
and hurled into the sky.
The rich man spilled his wine
and demanded
without quite knowing why:
Are you me? A future vision
of what I will become?
And the stranger answered:
No, you are me. The future image
of what I will be
when I am no longer just a beggar
but the subject
of nostalgia: the figure in a memory.
When you become
a beggar yet again, the circular path
that pretends to be
a shady lane
may reveal itself to be a spiral chute
leading to the centre
of a brute tormentor’s awful domain.
This paradox is painful, the irony
stabs the beggar’s side
like the barbed tip of a javelin.
From rags to riches
and back to rags:
pain, bliss, and then more agony,
tragedy, comedy,
an inevitable turn of the axletree.
And so he sips his cheaper wine
philosophically,
hunched in the inadequate
shelter of the leaning tombstone
he now calls home.
THE ROTTEN DUNGEON
The dungeon rotted away:
stones crumbled,
iron rusted,
slime evaporated,
heavy keys in grim locks
melted: even
the sense of despair faded
until nothing
was left but stubborn bones.
And the archaeologists say:
there is nothing
here worth excavating.
But the screams
still radiate, propagate,
through the interstellar dust
between nebulae:
extinct at source, of course
they persist elsewhere,
swirling unknown particles
in waves of fear.
The dungeon,
a sullen impression, appears
to have done its work well:
degradation
broadcasting itself as a type
of Hell among
the brimstone constellations.
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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