Lusus Poems | Examples


Premium MemberMonstrosity

the bracing factor
sun adds a finishing touch
lusus naturae
Categories: lusus, analogy, appreciation, natural disasters,
Form: Haiku

Lusus Naturae

The dark lake only buoys its own natatory denizens,
it allows some to swim, some to glide, dip or delve,
but those sombre waters pull down children
seeing them only as the cloud spawn of alien shores.

The waters are one unnatural creature, a sucking swirl;
a single stomach, that throttles, snags, and crushes,
it clogs the mind with the coiling swirls
of convulsive ghosts.

I am drowning, I fall upwards into a darkness
that contains no earth or sky.
The lake is a basilisk, it snakes into wide open eyes,
darkens the blood of small boys until they choke,
strangling on their own fear.

Decades later I awake, expelled once more
from the churn of its malignant maw,
still struggling inside a heartless embrace.

That cold lake remains within me to this day
It is a liquiform parasite that squirms in my dreams;
a submerged memory of my death - in waiting.
Categories: lusus, poetry,
Form: Free verse


The Lake That Ate Me

I Almost drowned,
which is to say,
I fell upwards into a darkness
that contained no earth or sky.

Ten years old and a strong swimmer,
but that lake only buoyed up
its own natatory denizens, 
it allowed some to swim,
some to glide, dip or delve,
but it consumes skinny 10-year-old kids;
that being the cloud spawn of an alien shore,
must be dragged down and chewed, 
like the pale moons reflection.

The muddy waters are one creature,
a sucking swirl, a single stomach,
it throttles, it snags with cuffing weeds, 
clogs with the intestines
of convulsive ghosts. 

I am drowning,
then they pierce that lusus naturae
with a long pole thrust from a skiff;
yank me out of its crushing press
like bait from a basilisks reeking maw.

Years later I still awake
from that heaving ‘lac sombre’,
an infection of the imagination
I’ve been harboring parasitically 
inside the moil of engulfing dreams.

Perhaps incongruously, 
it takes some time before I will enter rooms
with too high a ceiling.
Categories: lusus, poetry,
Form: Blank verse

Lusus Naturae Sonnet 47 (Petrarchan)

Between the witching hour and saffron dawn,
When guileless hearts are peacefully asleep,
An evil prowls a wolf amidst the sheep,
With fangs as bloody daggers swithly drawn;

And erelong the warmth of blood shall spawn,
A frenzy thus unloosed from hellish keep,
While all the angels’ watch and soothly weep,
As souls are bled, until ungodly gone.

Awake I prithee, yon morrow blushes night;
While sun forestalls evil in its grave,
Prepare a holy arsenal to fight;
And double-glaze thine eyes with marbled sight;

Your dead, undead shall rise a vampires’ slave,
Then woe to hearts unsheathed eftsoons twilight.
Categories: lusus, imaginationevil,
Form: Sonnet
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