One Night of Blood

Dusty streets lined with the shells of old cars
Seedy bars with buzzing neon signs
A perpetually rolling fog
         that comes every time the tide
         progresses its way in
         which is quite often.
Me, with barely a care
except for
she, my next victim, unaware
Just can’t stand the way she stares
at me, even after I’ve drained her
         and she has nothing.
Same feeling of almost drunken exhilaration
and longing, yearning for more.
I have seen babies cry
         old men sigh
         widows die
         vultures fly
But living on am I,
         even if I really shouldn’t say that.

Walking by the entrance to a dimly lighted
         subway station
Squalling metal on metal assults my ears,
Yet my undertaking can always be fulfilled here.
I love dark alleyways like this one.
Gives me a chance to think about the world
         before I rob it of something
         one more time
         which is quite often.

Climbing up onto a fire escape,
receiving whiffs of something interesting.
He sits on the windowsill,
steaming with glistening sweat
as though the fan in front of him doesn’t exist.
Radio blaring, more than half asleep.
(It’s no fun when they’re asleep.)
I keep climbing.
Black paint flaking off the stairway
         under my hands and feet.
The next window is open.
Yet my senses tell me no one is home.
Too bad.
I move on upwards,
cracking long clawlike fingernails on the metal.
I hate it when that happens.
So I drop back down.
The fall would have killed an ordinary mortal,
         but am I really so unordinary?

Written based on "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T.S. Eliot
Featured in the Horror-Scary Genre Newsletter 8-10-2002