Cheddar Man

By D.P. Gooding​

​

 

Lying in my pit in the fallout of another homebound crisis;

the wife, like Saturn, has devoured our children in a rage,

and now it seems she has finished with me as well.

Eyes leaden-weary, brain stamped down by history,

for no apparent reason my mind brings me leopards,

several of them packed together, as if waiting to get inside.

Their fur appears lifeless, flattened out like a pub carpet;

depressed and deflated, they are hunters in a vacuum,

athletic as the clay-like mammoth crushed by millennia;

suffocated for centuries, and yet apparently, somehow, survives.

 

 

 

 

​​D.P. Gooding’s poetry has been featured in One Hand Clapping, The Crank, Little Fish Magazine, and The Rusty Truck. His short fiction has been published in two anthologies by New Lit Salon Press and two volumes of The BHF Book of Horror Stories. He lives in a small village near the Cotswolds in the UK.