Cthonic Ballads
So, I wrote a ballad set roughly in the Cthulhu mythos. It was extremely hard to force ancient one gibberspeech into iambic trimeter/tetrameter alternating.
The Ballad of the Child of R’lyeh
Deep in the South where brambles grow
There lived a maiden fair
Her skin was bright, her eyes were dark
And light was in her hair
This girl I loved with all my heart
So marry her did I
We lived all happy for a year
Under azure skies
But the stars weren’t right the night
Our baby girl was born
When I showed her to my bride
She turned her head in scorn
“It’s not my child,” she said with spite
The moon all in her eyes,
“It’s a devil from beneath the sea
Or else above the sky.”
“It is not ours,” she said again
Bespeaking of her doom
“A fell-god came to me in sleep
And placed it in my womb.”
“Dear woman, how do you speak that way
About your blood and bone?”
“If blood it has,” she countered cold
“Let it now be shown.”
With that she reached out fierce and mean
Against the little child
I pulled my baby away from harm
- the hands of a woman wild
The doctors could avail her none
Of her strange illness
They said to wait and let her lie
In perfect stillness
For one full week I kept the child
Without her mother’s milk
All the while I watched her ma
Claim she’s of different ilk
Until one night I woke to find
My wife not next to me
Chilling fear crept through my heart
For my sweet baby
The moon, it stretched so white and long
Through windows on my way
Till in the nursery I saw
Her figure shadow-gray
Over the cradle of our child
My loved loomed, knife in hand
And chanting words beyond my ken
She struck down as she planned
Straightway I leaped and grabbed her arms
A cry raised in my throat
I tossed her back against the wall,
Her lovely face I smote
My wife, she crumpled to the ground
I being larger than she
But when I turned around I saw
Some new blasphemy
It was the moonlight that revealed
Which was once unseen
The dwimmer gone now from my eyes,
My sight now clear and keen
The form that lay in downy crib
Was no human thing
A mass of slick and black-tar bulk
With tiny, bone like wings
Reeling back, the terror shook
My body to the core
I tripped on blood-slick from my dear
And fell against the floor
From the cradle a noise emerged,
Demonic piping shrill
The sound, it crept like living thing
And carried graveyard’s chill
I seized the creature in my hands
And found new strength in hate
I strangled out its wretched sound
My madness to abate
But the demon would not die
By mortal hands alone
Wide rent it split its maw and screamed
A song of it’s true home
As if in dream I saw a sight
Of deep insanity
A city sunken beneath the waves
At the bottom of the sea
No words can truly tell the tale
Of how black abyss can be
Or how the city’s angles were
Without geometry
And in this city whose name cannot
By mortal mouths be said
I knew the presence of its king
Whose very being is dread
Long eons has this fear-beast slept
And dreamed inhuman schemes
And in its nightmares it conceived
Of giving humans dreams
It was this awful under-god
That spawned what I had seen
The creature I had thought a babe
But conceived it in a dream
Still in a daze I grasped my hand
For whatever it might find
Till I placed it on the boney knife
And sought the child-malign
The spawn of the unknown monster
Who dwells beneath the waves
Scattered over star-struck floor
Away towards watery caves
I raised the glinting blade on high
And drove it towards the beast
It was driven to the hilt
It’s soul to be released
Such a scream was let from out
The thing’s ungodly maw
I reeled as if struck by a blast
Or by his deadly claw
When I awoke the day had come
And my love had grown cold
Standing over me were men
Whom I did not know
If time then flowed in normal ways
It did not for me
Time was all just nonsense now
In the courts of Tennessee
They said that I had killed my girl
And my baby small
They would not listen when I said
I’d not killed at all
So now I sit in jailhouse cell
Speaking to you now
They say I killed my wife and child
But cannot tell you how
Could I have wrenched her body twain
As they said I have done?
And can I disappear a babe
While underneath the sun?
It was not me who did the deed
And ended my love’s life
It was the dark god under sea
Who caused me all this strife
So now I say to you, my friend
Forgo all hope and toil
There is a thing below the sea
To set the waves to boil
It is said in mad man’s tales
There is no death for those
Who can sleep for eternity
And death will death then know
The Ballad of the Child of R’lyeh
Deep in the South where brambles grow
There lived a maiden fair
Her skin was bright, her eyes were dark
And light was in her hair
This girl I loved with all my heart
So marry her did I
We lived all happy for a year
Under azure skies
But the stars weren’t right the night
Our baby girl was born
When I showed her to my bride
She turned her head in scorn
“It’s not my child,” she said with spite
The moon all in her eyes,
“It’s a devil from beneath the sea
Or else above the sky.”
“It is not ours,” she said again
Bespeaking of her doom
“A fell-god came to me in sleep
And placed it in my womb.”
“Dear woman, how do you speak that way
About your blood and bone?”
“If blood it has,” she countered cold
“Let it now be shown.”
With that she reached out fierce and mean
Against the little child
I pulled my baby away from harm
- the hands of a woman wild
The doctors could avail her none
Of her strange illness
They said to wait and let her lie
In perfect stillness
For one full week I kept the child
Without her mother’s milk
All the while I watched her ma
Claim she’s of different ilk
Until one night I woke to find
My wife not next to me
Chilling fear crept through my heart
For my sweet baby
The moon, it stretched so white and long
Through windows on my way
Till in the nursery I saw
Her figure shadow-gray
Over the cradle of our child
My loved loomed, knife in hand
And chanting words beyond my ken
She struck down as she planned
Straightway I leaped and grabbed her arms
A cry raised in my throat
I tossed her back against the wall,
Her lovely face I smote
My wife, she crumpled to the ground
I being larger than she
But when I turned around I saw
Some new blasphemy
It was the moonlight that revealed
Which was once unseen
The dwimmer gone now from my eyes,
My sight now clear and keen
The form that lay in downy crib
Was no human thing
A mass of slick and black-tar bulk
With tiny, bone like wings
Reeling back, the terror shook
My body to the core
I tripped on blood-slick from my dear
And fell against the floor
From the cradle a noise emerged,
Demonic piping shrill
The sound, it crept like living thing
And carried graveyard’s chill
I seized the creature in my hands
And found new strength in hate
I strangled out its wretched sound
My madness to abate
But the demon would not die
By mortal hands alone
Wide rent it split its maw and screamed
A song of it’s true home
As if in dream I saw a sight
Of deep insanity
A city sunken beneath the waves
At the bottom of the sea
No words can truly tell the tale
Of how black abyss can be
Or how the city’s angles were
Without geometry
And in this city whose name cannot
By mortal mouths be said
I knew the presence of its king
Whose very being is dread
Long eons has this fear-beast slept
And dreamed inhuman schemes
And in its nightmares it conceived
Of giving humans dreams
It was this awful under-god
That spawned what I had seen
The creature I had thought a babe
But conceived it in a dream
Still in a daze I grasped my hand
For whatever it might find
Till I placed it on the boney knife
And sought the child-malign
The spawn of the unknown monster
Who dwells beneath the waves
Scattered over star-struck floor
Away towards watery caves
I raised the glinting blade on high
And drove it towards the beast
It was driven to the hilt
It’s soul to be released
Such a scream was let from out
The thing’s ungodly maw
I reeled as if struck by a blast
Or by his deadly claw
When I awoke the day had come
And my love had grown cold
Standing over me were men
Whom I did not know
If time then flowed in normal ways
It did not for me
Time was all just nonsense now
In the courts of Tennessee
They said that I had killed my girl
And my baby small
They would not listen when I said
I’d not killed at all
So now I sit in jailhouse cell
Speaking to you now
They say I killed my wife and child
But cannot tell you how
Could I have wrenched her body twain
As they said I have done?
And can I disappear a babe
While underneath the sun?
It was not me who did the deed
And ended my love’s life
It was the dark god under sea
Who caused me all this strife
So now I say to you, my friend
Forgo all hope and toil
There is a thing below the sea
To set the waves to boil
It is said in mad man’s tales
There is no death for those
Who can sleep for eternity
And death will death then know