Thirteen Autumns and a Widow

Spawned wanton like blight on an auspicious night

Her eyes betrayed spells of the moon's eerie light

A disquieting gaze forever ghosting far seas

Bled white and dead, Her true mother was fed

To the ravenous wolves that the elements led

From crag-jagged mountains that seemingly grew in unease

Through the maw of the woods, a black carriage was drawn

Flanked by barbed lightning that hissed of the storm

(Gilded in crests of Carpathian breed)

Bringing slaves to the sodomite for the new-born

On that eve when the Countess' own came deformed

A tragedy crept to the name Bathory

Elizabeth christened, no paler a rose

Grew so dark as this sylph

None more cold in repose

Yet Her beauty spun webs

Round hearts a glance would betroth

She feared the light

So when She fell like a sinner to vice

Under austere, puritanical rule

She sacrificed...

Mandragora like virgins to rats in the wall

But after whipangels licked prisoners, thralled

Never were Her dreams so maniacally cruel

(And possessed of such delights)

For ravens winged Her nightly flights

Of erotica

Half spurned from the pulpit

Torments to occur

Half learnt from the cabal of demons

In Her

Her walk went to voodoo

To see Her own shadow adored

At mass without flaw

Though inwards She abhored

Not Her coven of suitors

But the stare of their Lord

"I must avert mine eyes to hymns

For His gaze brings dogmas to my skin

He knows that I dreamt of carnal rites

With Him undead for three long nights"

Elizabeth listened

No sermons intoned

Dragged such guilt to Her door

Tombed Her soul with such stone

For She swore the Priest sighed

When She knelt down to atone...

She feared the light

So when She fell

Like a sinner to vice

Under austere, puritanical rule

She sacrificed

Her decorum as chaste

To this wolf of the cloth

Pouncing to haunt

Her confessional box

Forgiveness would come

When Her sins were washed off

By rebaptism in white....

The looking glass cast Belladonna wreaths

'Pon the grave of Her innocence

Her hidden face spat murder

From a whisper to a scream

All sleep seemed cursed

In Faustian verse

But there in orgiastic Hell

No horrors were worse

Than the mirrored revelation

The She kissed the Devil's phallus

By Her own decree...

So with windows flung wide to the menstrual sky

Solstice Eve She fled the castle in secret

A daughter of the storm, astride Her favourite nightmare

On winds without prayer

Stigmata still wept between Her legs

A cold bloodedness which impressed new hatreds

She sought the Sorceress

Through the snow and dank woods to the sodomite's lair

Nine twisted fates threw hewn bone die

For the throat of Elizabeth

Damnation won and urged the moon

In soliloquy to gleam

Twixt the trees in shafts

To ghost a path

Past the howl of buggered nymphs

In the sodomite's grasp

To the forest's vulva

Where the witch scholared Her

In even darker themes

"Amongst philtres and melissas

Midst the grease of strangled men

And eldritch truths, elder ill-omen

Elizabeth came to life again"

And under lacerations of dawn She returned

Like a flame unto a deathshead

With a promise to burn

Secrets brooded as She rode

Through mist and marsh to where they showed

Her castle walls wherein the restless

Counted carrion crows

She awoke from a fable to mourning

Church bells wringing Her madly from sleep

Tolled by a priest, self castrated and hung

Like a crimson bat 'neath the belfry

The biblical prattled their mantras

Hexes six-tripled their fees

But Elizabeth laughed, thirteen Autumns had passed

And She was a widow from god and His wrath, finally...