2 POEMS by Christopher P. Mooney

L’ amour fou
– after Ted Hughes’ Lovesong

There was a love between them

He ate only her kisses, and could never be slaked
She clawed at him, gnashed her teeth at him
suffused her mouth and fed her soul with him

He wanted to fill her belly

Time stood perfectly still, for them,
with no meaning to their pasts and no hurry toward a future
The moment was enough

The universe itself dared not disturb them

She held him near, tendons taut,
with smiles words laughs
looks whispers caresses
He, a lover ensnared, needed not resist
and did not

The grunts through clenched teeth
were given, not taken,
as their skin cleaved together
in a bucking embrace

Dawn’s mist found them there
one indistinguishable from the other

WAR
– after Ted Hughes’ Crow’s Account of the Battle

It was a cataclysmic encounter
to rival the prophesised end of days.
The noise almost deafening;
from rallying cries to shouts of pain,
the clash of weapons
to the sound of booted feet on dry ground
and wails swallowed up in the gloom.

Tendons twitched on triggers,
doing as they were told.
Bullets ripped through sons’ flesh, their bones,
and lodged in husbands’ guts, brothers’ hearts and throats,
as the living looked on with disbelieving eyes
at the infernal carnage of a world gone wrong.

Grown men, strong men,
lay dying in the dark,
drowning in piss,
choking on blood and vomit
and on the memories of broken dreams
left unfulfilled;
deathly footprints the only reminder
that they had been real.

The stars burst out of their sockets
and the moon dripped red with blood
in a sky of hard mourning
above mankind’s hollow dust.

~~~

Christopher P. Mooney was born and brought up in Glasgow, Scotland, and currently lives near London, England. He has worked as a supermarket cashier, a shelf stacker, a barman, a cinema usher, a carpet-fitter’s labourer and a foreign-language assistant. He is now a professional teacher of French and English and an amateur writer of crime and horror fiction. His stories have been accepted for publication in print, online and on Kindle by Crooked Holster, Spelk Fiction, Dead Guns Press, Devolution Z, Out of the Gutter and Yellow Mama.