Many stories have I, and this is but one...
  It starts with the moon and ends with the sun.
  It’s about a young girl who sat under a tree.
  Velvet, she’s called, and Velvet is me.

  I filled a twig basket with bread and black ham
  And took it one day to give to my Gram.
  Dressed in a cape the color of frost
  I went off in the snow and got myself lost.

  In eleven short months, I was soon to be nine.
  Too big to snivel or whimper or whine.
  I sat by a tree to ponder my lot
  And a great sneaking shadow discovered my spot.

  Ham will draw trouble, as everyone knows.
  Bears like to eat it. And raccoons. And crows.
  I reached in my basket and offered it quick
  And the great sneaking thing gave it a lick.

  Safe! You might guess, because you don’t know
  That ham to a beast is not good as a toe.
  Snapping and cracking, It broke me apart.
  Sticky and torn as a strawberry tart.

  Its eyes swam with Evil like fish in a can
  And perhaps in there also, was some trace of a man.
  And, one or the other, I’ll never know which,
  Brushed my ripped throat with a tender kiss.

  I stared unblinking from the bed of my grave
  At the princely Moon and its howling slave,
  At a shivering tree with icicles for teeth
  Where upon a lone branch, clung a last violet leaf.

  Shaped like a heart, it fell on my breast
  And when the sun came, ‘twas all that was left.
  My wounds had sealed up, like it were a dream.
  The beast was quite gone, the snow smooth as cream.

  But hung by its hood on the bough of a pine
  Was a cape the color of a Valentine.
  Never pure white as it was before.
  A crimson secret, ever more.

  For weeks, I dressed dollys and played at jacks
  And the moon, as it will, began to wax
  And when it was full, a terrible thing!
  The brain in my head began to sting.

  It itched, it burned, it shrank to a nut.
  And, muscle by muscle, my strings were cut.
  My skin sloughed off and underneath
  Were fur-covered bones and yellowish teeth!

  And here is the part that I don’t like to say
  But it happened that Dempsey was over that day.
  Dempsey, dear Dempsey, my cousin of four
  Towering his blocks on the nursery floor.

  Sweet as a dumpling, with red apple cheeks
  (they’d be scrubbing them off the wallpaper for weeks)
  A more mannered boy, there never will be.
  I ate him like licorice, my darling Dempsey.

return