Blood Wedding

 The bloody footprints down the hall,

The baby bricked into the wall,

The nanny smothered with her shawl, 

It isn’t any good at all;

Somebody has to pay.

I told you so. I told you so,

I told you something has to go,

Somebody needs to find the dough

And ante up today.

Short change in short, and shorter shrift,

The gunsel sliding from the lift,

The consigliere getting biffed,

You get my drift, you get my drift,

You have to take the strain.

For more is less and less is more.

It’s what you stole the money for:

The shinbones underneath the floor,

The fingers in the drain.

I know it’s never what you meant,

And you’re the one that pays the rent.

I wish this wasn’t how it went.

I wish some things were different

But that’s the way they are,

And I’m the one who digs the dirt:

The bellhop slaughtered in his shirt,

His bottom stuffed with bladderwort,

His mouth stopped up with tar.

He should have done as he was bid,

Have zipped the lip and shut the lid,

But having, as he surely did,

The morals of the katydid,

The wisdom of the moth,

Poor lad, he needed talking to.

We know that, don’t we? It was you

And always only you who knew

The Chronicles of Thoth:

A book that chills the soul with dread,

A book much better left unread,

A language of the living dead

Whose voices drive you off your head.

They do, my sweet, they do.

And now we reach the terminus,

Dead calm succeeding all the fuss,

Who’s mad and bad and murderous?

It’s you, my own, it’s you.