Christian Drake
Slugworth
I’m still the boy shoplifting penny sweets
from the tobacconist. I learned to wait
until the sneering shopkeep dropped his guard
to sell a racecard to some yellowed drunk,
then mued tattling jar lids with a sleeve.
My hands fledged fast. Two ration tokens bought
a Sherbet Fountain, or my mother’s smokes;
I could come home the good boy, with my coat
askew, weighed down with stolen humbug dates
& wine drops in one bulging pocket. I’d
escape the birch that night, & lose my teeth
in secret jujubes gnawed like a bone.
In starving darkness, colours. Sweeter still
was thievery, the knowledge that my hands
flit quicker than the Earth could grab its purse.
No delectation could refuse my tongue.
You misers, hoarding chocolate in a war.
I’m in your candy factories with spies,
confectionary saboteurs to gum your works,
your whimsical machines, your recipes,
your genius. My sweet tooth is a fang.
I am the liquorice shadow of your smokestack
falling on the schoolhouse door at bell.
What’s mine is more delicious when it’s yours.
I suck your Brighton rock until it’s sharp
as hate, no biting down. I’ve learned to wait.
I savor envy like it was a gobstopper
that never shrinks, kept in my cheek intact
since boyhood. Bite it & it breaks your jaw.
The world’s a candy shop. I want it all.
I’m still the boy shoplifting penny sweets
from the tobacconist. I learned to wait
until the sneering shopkeep dropped his guard
to sell a racecard to some yellowed drunk,
then mued tattling jar lids with a sleeve.
My hands fledged fast. Two ration tokens bought
a Sherbet Fountain, or my mother’s smokes;
I could come home the good boy, with my coat
askew, weighed down with stolen humbug dates
& wine drops in one bulging pocket. I’d
escape the birch that night, & lose my teeth
in secret jujubes gnawed like a bone.
In starving darkness, colours. Sweeter still
was thievery, the knowledge that my hands
flit quicker than the Earth could grab its purse.
No delectation could refuse my tongue.
You misers, hoarding chocolate in a war.
I’m in your candy factories with spies,
confectionary saboteurs to gum your works,
your whimsical machines, your recipes,
your genius. My sweet tooth is a fang.
I am the liquorice shadow of your smokestack
falling on the schoolhouse door at bell.
What’s mine is more delicious when it’s yours.
I suck your Brighton rock until it’s sharp
as hate, no biting down. I’ve learned to wait.
I savor envy like it was a gobstopper
that never shrinks, kept in my cheek intact
since boyhood. Bite it & it breaks your jaw.
The world’s a candy shop. I want it all.
The Riddler Confesses
1.
You think my peculiarity is for riddles,
because you are an idiot.
My great passion
is to be hunted.
It is like being loved.
So I leave you these little jelly beans,
as one would a child. Valentines, Darling.
After I
skywrite you nursery rhymes
easy enough for your boy toy to guess,
I murder the skywriter.
I zigzag like a fox, but leave tracks.
Something obvious & scented for you to follow
as we go round and round
this miserable carousel
of predator & prey.
2.
There’s a reason they call it an asylum. It’s where I
do my best thinking. A memory palace.
While the chimps next door are figuring out
how to sharpen bed posts into spears, I
have already robbed every bank in the city
in my mind. The padded walls, blueprints.
This place is my throne, my crossword Versailles.
You think you are imprisoning me here? I
am asking you to unlock the door for me
& invite me back in,
a minotaur at the heart of chaos.
3.
Darling, I knew your secret identity before you did.
Your little façade, the sound of a scream
with your mouth taped shut.
I’ve already spelunked your pretty cave
from stalagmites to grandfather clock
with my genius. Did you know you have a new species
of blind, white salamander living in the secret river
beneath the pyramid of computers you use for a brain?
I have not seen it, but I discovered it with math.
Your entire costume is no more than a bow-tie.
A vampire bat you wear as a boutonniere.
Your mask is like my mask: Useless but polite,
a napkin dabbing the soup from your mouth
as you excuse yourself suddenly
from the dinner party.
4.
You should know there is a hostage in this poem.
They will die in a minute.
Twice, in a moment.
But not in an hour.
Who is it?
5.
I was an inquisitive child. I followed
my father at his boot heels like a bird
who hatched, looked up, and fell in love
with the wrong animal. Why does Z come last?
Why is an orange called an orange? Why don't
sheep shrink in the rain? Why do people
call the sky blue when it can be every color?
Why is infinity a number? Why is Mom always asleep?
A baby robin, begging mouth ever open
for answers. My father would look down my throat
at the empty stomach of my curiosity
and beat me until my face was the color
of your mask. Eyes swollen blind. Still, I’d ask,
Why? Why? Each slap, it had to have a reason.
Inside him, a swarm was continuously born
of some mysterious mother, a queen bee
I could never find among the thousands. Why?
And like the blood, the questions never fully stopped
drip, dripping from my quivering lips.
6.
He has a look of awful scorn.
He wears his clothes a funny way.
He waves his fingers over corn
and frightens all the birds away.
But scarier than him, I find,
is the question with no answer,
gnawing slowly at your mind
like a brain’s voracious cancer.
Such as: what if no one died
that awful night? Would Gotham be
a garden black with homicide,
its scarecrows criminals like me?
And if your mom and dad and you
had all survived, would you have grown
into the socialite’s milieu,
your only mask your French cologne?
What if? What if? It keeps the child
awake and terrified all night.
Their monsters tiptoe through the wilds,
whispering, ...did you choose right?
No scarecrow like a question mark.
No mirrors like imagined worlds,
now bouncing off into the dark
just like so many scattered pearls.
7.
You call me a villain; I call myself the avenger
of Alan Turing. Another man who lived in the space
between the dots and the dashes, ones and zeros.
Another genius crucified for your comfort.
When the woman is born who will cure cancer,
she will be burned like Joan of Arc. When
a man first told the truth about the cosmos,
he was bled until he recanted. And when Alan
rescued humankind from a virus they could not cure
themselves, they made him wear breasts,
they fed him a poisoned apple. Made him choose
between ones and zeros. Made him a 0. Let’s
see you all solve it on your own this time. I think
the code he broke deserves a second chance.
I think you deserve the enigma.
8.
You call yourself an orphan, yet
have never known the orphanage.
Let me hold one hostage, so that you
might deign to visit. Please, enter
my soundproof & transparent elevator,
wrapped in plastiques. Click. Whirrr. Click.
Let me make you watch the little cretins
try to solve my deathtrap while they snie.
Something elementary, like Morse code. You
cannot hear them cry as the math eludes them,
as the clock subtracts in steady drops,
as you silently scream the answer
like a black goldfish in an aquarium.
Then you will know my orphan-ness.
I am only an average man trapped in a world
of deadly imbeciles.
9.
I find you in darkness but never light.
I’m present in daytime but absent in night.
In the deepest of shadows, we hide in plain sight.
Who are we?
10.
I could have been Emily.
I was born a paradox, between two spirits.
The doctors thought they could solve me
with a scalpel, like teenagers dissecting a frog.
But the world remembered me. It once called me
the sphinx, and I ate men alive.
My cannibal breath in your face,
my breasts pressed against your armor,
riddle me this.
I burned the hospital last year.
Those old obstetricians will never know if
they chose right.
The best riddles have no answer.
Raven, meet writing desk.
I am both. I am a cypher with no author.
A circle of code that can’t be broken.
11.
You know what I hate about poetry today?
No risk. And no lingering burlesques
of language, nor labyrinthine
art museums for you to wander,
to stall you, make you take your time.
Darling, we are only in the middle of the end.
Find the clues in this poem
to find out
in whose mouth
I taped the time bomb.
1.
You think my peculiarity is for riddles,
because you are an idiot.
My great passion
is to be hunted.
It is like being loved.
So I leave you these little jelly beans,
as one would a child. Valentines, Darling.
After I
skywrite you nursery rhymes
easy enough for your boy toy to guess,
I murder the skywriter.
I zigzag like a fox, but leave tracks.
Something obvious & scented for you to follow
as we go round and round
this miserable carousel
of predator & prey.
2.
There’s a reason they call it an asylum. It’s where I
do my best thinking. A memory palace.
While the chimps next door are figuring out
how to sharpen bed posts into spears, I
have already robbed every bank in the city
in my mind. The padded walls, blueprints.
This place is my throne, my crossword Versailles.
You think you are imprisoning me here? I
am asking you to unlock the door for me
& invite me back in,
a minotaur at the heart of chaos.
3.
Darling, I knew your secret identity before you did.
Your little façade, the sound of a scream
with your mouth taped shut.
I’ve already spelunked your pretty cave
from stalagmites to grandfather clock
with my genius. Did you know you have a new species
of blind, white salamander living in the secret river
beneath the pyramid of computers you use for a brain?
I have not seen it, but I discovered it with math.
Your entire costume is no more than a bow-tie.
A vampire bat you wear as a boutonniere.
Your mask is like my mask: Useless but polite,
a napkin dabbing the soup from your mouth
as you excuse yourself suddenly
from the dinner party.
4.
You should know there is a hostage in this poem.
They will die in a minute.
Twice, in a moment.
But not in an hour.
Who is it?
5.
I was an inquisitive child. I followed
my father at his boot heels like a bird
who hatched, looked up, and fell in love
with the wrong animal. Why does Z come last?
Why is an orange called an orange? Why don't
sheep shrink in the rain? Why do people
call the sky blue when it can be every color?
Why is infinity a number? Why is Mom always asleep?
A baby robin, begging mouth ever open
for answers. My father would look down my throat
at the empty stomach of my curiosity
and beat me until my face was the color
of your mask. Eyes swollen blind. Still, I’d ask,
Why? Why? Each slap, it had to have a reason.
Inside him, a swarm was continuously born
of some mysterious mother, a queen bee
I could never find among the thousands. Why?
And like the blood, the questions never fully stopped
drip, dripping from my quivering lips.
6.
He has a look of awful scorn.
He wears his clothes a funny way.
He waves his fingers over corn
and frightens all the birds away.
But scarier than him, I find,
is the question with no answer,
gnawing slowly at your mind
like a brain’s voracious cancer.
Such as: what if no one died
that awful night? Would Gotham be
a garden black with homicide,
its scarecrows criminals like me?
And if your mom and dad and you
had all survived, would you have grown
into the socialite’s milieu,
your only mask your French cologne?
What if? What if? It keeps the child
awake and terrified all night.
Their monsters tiptoe through the wilds,
whispering, ...did you choose right?
No scarecrow like a question mark.
No mirrors like imagined worlds,
now bouncing off into the dark
just like so many scattered pearls.
7.
You call me a villain; I call myself the avenger
of Alan Turing. Another man who lived in the space
between the dots and the dashes, ones and zeros.
Another genius crucified for your comfort.
When the woman is born who will cure cancer,
she will be burned like Joan of Arc. When
a man first told the truth about the cosmos,
he was bled until he recanted. And when Alan
rescued humankind from a virus they could not cure
themselves, they made him wear breasts,
they fed him a poisoned apple. Made him choose
between ones and zeros. Made him a 0. Let’s
see you all solve it on your own this time. I think
the code he broke deserves a second chance.
I think you deserve the enigma.
8.
You call yourself an orphan, yet
have never known the orphanage.
Let me hold one hostage, so that you
might deign to visit. Please, enter
my soundproof & transparent elevator,
wrapped in plastiques. Click. Whirrr. Click.
Let me make you watch the little cretins
try to solve my deathtrap while they snie.
Something elementary, like Morse code. You
cannot hear them cry as the math eludes them,
as the clock subtracts in steady drops,
as you silently scream the answer
like a black goldfish in an aquarium.
Then you will know my orphan-ness.
I am only an average man trapped in a world
of deadly imbeciles.
9.
I find you in darkness but never light.
I’m present in daytime but absent in night.
In the deepest of shadows, we hide in plain sight.
Who are we?
10.
I could have been Emily.
I was born a paradox, between two spirits.
The doctors thought they could solve me
with a scalpel, like teenagers dissecting a frog.
But the world remembered me. It once called me
the sphinx, and I ate men alive.
My cannibal breath in your face,
my breasts pressed against your armor,
riddle me this.
I burned the hospital last year.
Those old obstetricians will never know if
they chose right.
The best riddles have no answer.
Raven, meet writing desk.
I am both. I am a cypher with no author.
A circle of code that can’t be broken.
11.
You know what I hate about poetry today?
No risk. And no lingering burlesques
of language, nor labyrinthine
art museums for you to wander,
to stall you, make you take your time.
Darling, we are only in the middle of the end.
Find the clues in this poem
to find out
in whose mouth
I taped the time bomb.
Christian Drake is a poet from Northampton, Massachusetts. He has performed his poetry at over 100 venues in the US & Canada, as well as being a member of six National Poetry Slam teams in Washington, DC, Berkeley, CA, & Albuquerque, NM. His written work has been published in Muzzle, Drunk in a Midnight Choir, & others. You can find unpublished & often unedited works of his at seachanteysandmexicanradio.wordpress.com. Christian spent his pandemic reading a lot of comic books & has been become one of those guys who tries to get people into Moon Knight.