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From: mr.mincemeat@syteka.UUCP (mr.mincemeat)
Newsgroups: net.poems
Subject: happy family
Message-ID: <380@syteka.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 12-Oct-83 20:34:04 EDT
Article-I.D.: syteka.380
Posted: Wed Oct 12 20:34:04 1983
Date-Received: Fri, 14-Oct-83 03:07:25 EDT
Lines: 107








	There is this pair two people
	Husband and wife they are
	And living not gladly
	In the house of his father
	Who was weird, and
	Is dead of strange causes.
	The wife is not happy,
	The house being old
	And strange also
	Imbued as it is
	With shades of the dearly
	Departed dead scholar and taker
	Of notes, many pages now stored
	Expectantly waiting
	In dusty array in a small room upstairs.

	After a space and
	Over wifely objections
	The son and young husband
	Begins to explore these tomes-
	Diffident at first
	And them more avidly as
	His interest, some might
	Say obsession-
	His worried wife is one-
	Grows and soon
	As more and more his
	Time is spent among the
	Books and papers
	And strange sounds are heard and
	Stranger odors smelled
	By the dutiful wife
	With beautiful tormented eyes
	The man grows odder
	And it seems his appearance
	While never too fine
	His wife is the first to admit
	Becomes bony and gnarled
	Somewhat like the dead father
	The last time she saw him
	Before his untimely demise.

	But only somewhat
	And her husband says
	Uncharacteristically communicative
	For his newfound persona,
	His father went wrong, did not take
	The right path...
	This some few days
	Before scratching comes at her door,
	While she sleeps at night, alone,
	Her husband busy as usual
	With books and strange smells-
	She is indeed frightened, and
	Calls, cries out to him;
	He comes then through the door
	On which he had been scratching
	Wizened beyond belief
	Greenish and studded
	With protruding hornlike things
	And leering and gobbling
	Deep in his throat
	Leaps for his wife
	Who dodges, runs gibbering
	With fear through the house
	Her husband this thing in spiny
	Pursuit and growing ever more
	Withered and like something dead
	Until she is cornered
	In some seldom used storeroom
	And his attenuation reaching its zenith
	Leaves him at last only
	Bones which fall clattering
	Unjointed and lumpy
	And become unwholesome dust while his
	Wife puts her fingers deep in her mouth
	Screaming all the while and staring and staring
	As the dust sinks into the floor itself
	And the floorboards begin moving and seemingly live
	And she hears the doors slamming
	Throughout the house and
	Suddenly even the
	Door to this room shuts
	Tight by itself as the lights
	Die abruptly and the floor's
	Undulations are matched by the wispy
	And dry quiet dead chuckling
	So much like her husband
	And her own voice shrieking
	In the tones of the damned.






			 mr.mincemeat

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