by Christopher Ryan

I should have been editing Soul Scream. Or completing the uploading of Genius High. But opportunity called and I dove back in to … poetry. Dark horror crime poetry about the most modern of monsters.

And I tested the limits of my marriage, too.

The latter is not something writers encourage. Leave the spouse out of it, they all say. Why torture the ones you love?

(Enough of that wiseass.)

I am not a flowery poet, nor a technically proficient one. My poetry heroes run more to Bukowski and Jim Carroll. But please do not blame them.

So what kind of poems did I attempt? Lots of free verse in this work, a touch of concrete, a highway pileup of rhyming verses with exterior and interior rhymes slamming together to tell a bit of the tale, a distant cousin of Fibonacci (really distant, like through a broken marriage but the cousins on both sides still talk distant), and yes, some haiku. All used to build one narrative crime horror tale. From the monster’s POV.

And I don’t know what I have, honestly.

But I know it feels right (and so does Glorious, wiseass).

What is it? An 81-page narrative horror poetry collection about the modern American equivalent of Dracula, metaphorically, at least.

And with it, I meet my first goal toward submitting at least one new work a week in 2023. At least I will tomorrow, when I submit it over morning tea.

I’m on a roll of one week in a row. Heh.

I just pray I don’t succumb to the Writer’s Disease, “Maybe I should just read it over one more time…”

Keep creating, brothers and sisters. Art matters.