Requiem for Bertie

A walking cadaver feasting yet never full. Hollow sunken cheeks. Fetid breath. Mortuary bones clacking like castanets signal a dirge for a being hanging onto life yet bound for the grave. More specter than man. A rambling absurdity. Vultures patiently await thy final fall. Ye reek of the morgue. Thy entire body festers as a gangrenous wound. He beckons! He beckons! Rub him down with frankincense and myrrh! Ready thy flesh for winding sheet and cooling board. Turn back all covered mirrors! Face thy head to the North Star. Every road ye tread leads to the crypt. Thy Tomb awaits thee and bids thee step in.

Island of the Damned -- Bocklin — Island of the Damned by Bocklin

The smell of death accompanies thy uprising and approach. A stench emanating from thy despoiled core lingers in every room. Onlookers vainly swing their heads in disgust trying to dislodge tastes of putrid flesh invading their tongues. Youth and health have been dispersed to the gale like leaves whipped by the windstorm then fallen to soil. Leaves decomposing returning to the earth from whence they came. No potions, brews or concoctions from Ye Olde Apothecary Shoppe can save thee now. Threescore and ten shall not be thine for the Fates are poised to cut life’s cord.

The Pale Horseman rides for thee. This night thy soul is required. Ferry passage has been booked and Charon awaits you dockside for thy journey across the River Styx. Once shiny obsidian bursting with life now ye become dusty white-grey urn ashes. A tree that once stood tall in the forest has fallen never to rise again. Strong saplings are pine boxes for many Potters Fields.

Once to the bazaar now to the funeral. Maggot courtiers await the beck and call of thy rotted corpse. Hypnos wicked opium dram shall deliver thy harvest ready soul gathered unto Thanatos sickle and scythe. Journeys fueled by alcohol, cigarettes and sugar end much too soon. Yonder cemetery will be thy new home.

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The Urban Zompire’s Junkie Dilemma

Pickled heroin methadone heart. Brains oozing oxycodone pus. Blood inferno tastes of road tar and gasoline fired up my internals causing me untold hours of nocturnal agonies. I am thrashing as flames roar through veins and arteries. Oh where is the pure sweet virgin blood that will wash away these LSD hallucinating fantasies that have me flying off twenty-six story buildings down in back alleys filled with Quaaludes, dirty needles, Crank, crack undead hunting, seeking, roaming searching……

The drugs have gotten nastier over the decades while I with a Claude Rains get-up travel as the Invisible Man prowling the underbelly of the city buried in a darkness so deep that nary a ray of solar has pierced it’s shades in over one hundred years. After feasting upon coke rattled users their blood coagulates and congeals before I can swallow. Feeling like something was gagging me and needed to be coughed up and expelled. In times that I was truly desperate and bereft of money and social graces I preyed on the homeless, walked the halls of neglected overworked City hospitals where no one questioned my presence the abandoned and unwanted were rancid, rotten, salty from IVs, antiseptic from disinfectants, but being ravenous with unchecked hunger I ignored their foul smells I drank my filling ending the useless meaningless lives faster than the diseases ravaging their corrupted bodies.

I reign as a leech, a mosquito seeking succulent prey. Sometimes I follow Catholics after Midnight Mass. The popists still use real wine so tender, so gentle that one can still detect hints of the grapes origins. Not like that Protestant grape juice shit that triggers the urge to regurgitate saccharine back onto my victims. Transients and one-stands, for I filled the trick-turners with sperm-less semen, were the worse for vomited tinged sweat oozed from the pores and every bodily orifice.

Crack houses of 1980s and 1990s recall in memory the squalid opium dens of 19th Century Sherlockian London. His Seven percent solution mellowed out by a good cocaine laced Vin Mariani. Exsanguinating the well-born dandies whose addictions to Legal opium, laudanum, cocaine and morphine well fueled by shots of Brandy and smooth Cognac produced a sweet umber warmth quenching my parched throat. There by night I’m the suave smooth sophisticate, the pompous dandy now called Metrosexual I float into the 21st Century luring gullible Trust Fund babies High Class Tarts into my Lair relieving them of not only their life essence but whatever monies and valuables I find within Glass and steel Luxury condos.

I especially enjoy emptying their medicine cabinets and secret bedroom chambers filled with Celexa, Lexapro, Paxil, Prozac, Zoloft, Xanax, Klonopin, Valium, and Ativan. With some Ambien thrown in for good measure. Makes it so easy to get the Stepford 1% Women to do my bidding. Wealthy but weak. No street smarts like the inner-city denizens. They are the filet mignon of human victims their blood tart, tangy, occasionally sour milk with a nutsy woodsy crisp flavor that I crave nightly. Their minds a blank slate easily led. Liberal on the outside, Tea Party on the inside their bones crack easily as I sucked bone marrow from femurs. Here I am well-nourished so here I will stay. The Fortune 500 are my personal cornucopia.