
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
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.
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
This Old House of Pain and Woe
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
This Old House of Pain and Woe

