In the dilapidated house upon the hill,
much bigger on the inside, with more rooms
than any man could ever hope to count,
even an idiot savant, she wandered
until Diane approached the green door
numbered 32. She’d actually passed by it
a couple times during her frantic race
through the red plush carpeted halls
that smelled of an old floral perfume
and mildew, and sickly sweet decay.
Each room was home to some new madness
and they all wanted Diane to visit them.
She’d barely escaped the muscular giant
with a triangular head, swinging an oversize hammer
as he went down a line of hog-tied children
and crushed their bleating, lamblike Median faces.
She was gone before he finished and could give chase
to another which had a large circular table
with a sonnenrad mosaic of black pebbles
at its heart, around which were gathered
a tall, thin, dapper gentleman in a white suit coat and hat
and a long white cane that ended in a crystal globe,
unsmiling, with black inhuman eyes and imperfect teeth.
And the rest of the seven seated there
were all red, black or white spiders,
carefully guarding the hand they’d been dealt.
“Shall we deal you in?” The white spider inquired,
scooting aside to make room for her
as she slammed shut the door.
In another room she found
wall to wall books, a pile of dirty dishes,
a cup overflowing with cigarette butts,
and an iron chain around the ankle
of a gaunt poet with dark, sunken, haunted eyes
and a beard Rasputin would admire.
He was hump-backed, his black hair thinning,
and his fingers were yellowish from nicotine stains
with long, talon-like nails
that clacked furiously on the keys.
As the trepidatious girl crept closer
to get a better look at the curious toys
he had scattered among the trash,
Diane noticed words appear on the screen
like wriggling ants marching in erratic formation
and they read: “As the trepidatious girl crept closer
to get a better look at the curious toys
he had scattered among the trash …”
She gasped, cupping her mouth
to keep the scream from escaping.
“… the writer turned his monstrous face to her
and laughed and laughed and laughed
as she shook her head, cried
‘This cannot be so!
I am a real person!
I am! I am! I am so!’
and then left the writer
to finally, after all this time,
complete his blasphemous master construction.
Only sixty or so pages to go.”
Next she found a hobo clown orgy,
a headless man and a heartless woman playing catch
with a big red beach ball, a group of goblins
playing kottabos after a feast, a garden
where every kind of flower grows
and the breeze is always gentle,
a man wearing a cheap rubber wolf mask
wrestling with a man in a buffalo headdress,
five black dwarfs doing a shield dance
around a smouldering forge
in an otherwise darkened room,
a naked woman in a featureless mask
encoiled by a vast horned dragon,
undulating and moaning lasciviously,
a pale French man trying to peel off his face
in the closet of a completely empty room,
an artists’ flat that more resembled
crafts day at the sanitorium,
a room full of funhouse mirrors
she thought she’d never find her way out of,
a ballroom with ceiling painted like
a tent of vines from which nooses
and dozens of convulsing girls hung,
a bald, fat man with smudged white face paint
and a purple and gold robe who held
a box of treasures out to her,
but she refused to take one and fled to the next room
where an athletic blond was birthing twins
by the side of a rushing river
with no one there to help her,
a man being eaten by his hunting hounds,
a crowded room where everyone ignored one another
because their faces had literally been glued to the glowing screens
of their devices, a room with wobbling, talking penises,
another with pig faced men doing a clumsy circle dance,
another with a dozen putti sleeping like bats,
another containing a Centaur with a drinking problem,
in one was Orpheus drilling a trio of raccoons
until they could keep their strophes and antistrophes straight,
then a tall Caucasian man whose innards
were being devoured by a large, dark-winged bird,
a cowboy dressed in black with a serrated hunting knife
torturing a girl in a cornflower blue pioneer dress,
demanding to know why she didn’t remember him,
and a room that was completely empty
except for a star that glowed with inverse light.
That was the last one she’d checked,
and now she found herself back to Rm. 32.
She was terrified of what she would find,
knew it was worse than all the rest
as whatever demented intelligence that governed this place
had designed it specially for her.
The gross white worm
which chewed through the mushroom
and began smoking a hooka
had told her as much.
So Diane mustered her courage
(“It was all a dream anyway, right?”)
and reached for the gold doorknob.
It was locked. And with a sinking, nauseous feeling
in the pit of her stomach, Diane knew
that she had the key on her already.
