I Turned My Eye

I have read in other blogs that writers should post their old works, even if they aren’t very good. Especially if they aren’t very good. I wrote this in 2014. It was one of my first poems in decades, since high school.

I turned my eye from higher things
As I walked home from school
And on a path I’d never tried
I spied a crimson pool.

‘Twas still, rimmed round with ebon grass
And thistles fine as thread.
I knelt, hoping to see myself
Anew, but saw instead

A wolf with empty, piggish eyes,
Yet human underneath,
Black years-old blood crusting his shirt,
And flesh between his teeth.

I scrambled from his grasping claws.
I felt them scrape my throat.
And dived into dead rose bushes
As he clung to my coat.

“You’ve come at last,” the monster cried.
“May I offer you food?”
“This wolf knows me,” I realized
And fled into the woods.

I came upon a howling tree,
And on its branches hanged
A sheet of sallow skin, dead nails,
And moon-shot eyes, and fanged.

When it saw me, it loosed the noose,
And scrambled to the ground
Then joined the wolf in my pursuit
With a lost, flapping sound.

They chased me thru a cobwebbed heath
T’wards a decaying ghoul,
A sour, sorrowful old man
Who had squandered his soul.

It seemed they had me trapped for life
But, I swallowed my pride.
And saw that I had doomed myself.
I bowed my head and cried,

I sped, I hoped, towards the bland path
I’d trod, although I knew
I shun’t have left the way I found
Just to see something new.

And as I ran, I prayed, and found
My humble path, at last.
And vowed to God that I would leave
My demons in the past.