The Haunted Armor
The courtyard knight
is a soulless armor, midnight black,
with a ruby crest of feathers.
The shoulder and elbow axes ready,
mace curled, for any intruder
to be stored and devoured.
Whatever the vampire preferred,
this undead master of the castle.
The armor is a servant to the chief blood-drinker,
with skin as snow, lace, and marble,
always waiting atop his velvet throne.
He’s a king between the staircases,
that parted sea of serpentine steps
with sweating torches clawed to the wall.
They’re lit by a purple flame never dying,
a cursed luminescence chewing the obsidian walls.
The armor wasn’t like the siren,
floating in the moat,
that finned shadow in the teal ring,
singing for any stranger
wandering through the empty ramparts.
Lured asleep under her shipwreck spell
to be drowned, stored, and softened
in the turquoise trough of rocks.
The armor wasn’t the forest werewolf,
spiked, prowling, fang-grinned,
clawing deer with boredom,
and snatching baby birds with sickle-claws.
The woods, a paper-bristled witness
to the demon hounds’ carnivorous wanderings.
The watching trees wished they could talk
so they could scream.
The death-dealing practiced
by this castle of devilry
and its nightmare occupants
were doldrums for this coat of arms.
Clanking the grounds, wondering
what life would be like without
a visit from any innocent travelers.
Would it be here without them?
Spikes and Spells
Two sit waiting in a purple castle,
with glowing brick, periwinkle walls,
and indigo, spiraled towers
that sky pierce below the forever moon.
Their swamp’s the perfect garden for mineral
Flowers sprouting from a toxic miasma
these haunted ramparts call home.
They call those glass petals,
edged and eclipsed by blood twilight,
the Witch’s Rose; an homage to the keep’s ruler.
The ageless sorcerer with silver hair
and a violet crown catching like
a lavender sunspot in a solar storm.
She isn’t alone in her ghoulish outpost.
A mutant tiger, spiked, brawny,
curled in feline marmalade,
prowls the empty, overgrown courtyard.
Occasionally, tongue-cleaning its butcher-paws.
Its back is spears. Its claws are swords,
and its maw, capable of throaty purrs,
is grinned in sabers and fangs.
The witch, with the power to whisper
a dandelion of fire from a half-dead dragon,
is the only one who dares pet this beast,
running their fingers, weighty with magic rings,
through the fibrous stalks of living steel.
Sometimes she sings,
and sometimes he purrs.
After all, you only feel like a monster
if you’re truly alone.
The Quiet and Hungry
She most certainly did wish to warn them,
that statue of rock with mossy perfume
and stone silk in a ruffled dress.
A little girl, hoisting an oyster with no harbor nearby.
Her ponytail smile, a grimace if you
look carefully through the straps of sun
checkering the entrance to the labyrinth.
The maze behind her spoke constantly,
a hedge-wall beacon of consumption and hunger,
drawn in corridors, lines, and slabs of greenery.
Switching, moving, flipping, till those rows of sculpted jade
were a botanical enigma for all inside.
Soon they’ll fall asleep to nickels of pollen,
their meat harvested in vine-tight cocoons.
The muted statue wanted to alert all these
flimsy souls approaching this blossom puzzle.
Also, the haunted maze wanted to stop feasting,
but its leafy throat and bowels were hunger-trained
and slobbering for skin and sinew slush.
It wondered why it had this blood-bile diet,
and not the standard raindrops and sun fire.
Every day we’re a statue
and a maze.
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Patrick W. Marsh is a writer and poet from Minneapolis, Minnesota. He writes books, poems, and podcasts. He loves monsters, and they bully him around in everything he writes.
