Fellow Texas horror author and poet, Joe McKinney has generously allowed me the opportunity to share this fabulous new poem with you about the one and only infamous Vlad Tepes! For more information on Joe McKinney and his work visit joemckinney.net.


“Vlad Tepes Answers to the Charges Against Him”
By Joe McKinney ©2009


He rises, sudden as lightning.
His anger, like thunder, rolls from his brow,
And leaves the assembled honor of the court dumb with fear,
Like sheep,
Gaping up the meadowed mountainside at the mad god descending.


My fellow Christians,
Our world is walled at the Danube, and that wall must be guarded by men willing to edify the Turks on a forest of stakes.
Who will author such an act?
You?
You, Matthias Corvinus?
You would not dare to bear my cross.
You weep for Radu the lap dog, and you curse my stiff-necked pride.
Puppet kings have that luxury.
You have the luxury of licking boots
While I am the wall
I am the teeth
And every Turk who slides ass first down my stakes,
Whose rotting corpse fouls our air,
While horrible and grotesque to you,
But dies to keep the Danube a Christian land.



But you and your court, on your ponies, with your ladies,
Won’t talk about me.
I am the shame in your pride.
I am your wall,
And you need me there.


I speak of freedom, of courage, of honor.
To men like you, those words are a political inconvenience.
A joke.


I hold you in small regard.
You raise children behind the wall that I create,
And would condemn me for the way I create it.


Become one of the peasant boys along the roadside,
Waving your hat as we march off to fight.
Or fight beside me.
Either way,
My king,
You are not man enough to weigh an opinion on me.


In his anger, he has bit his lip.
Bleeding, he stares about the court.
He dares a rebuttal.


Silence.


And then,
His folly turns like bad food in his gut.
He feels sick.


This is death, he says.


He melts into his chair.


To no one, he mutters, And I am cursed by death. Not to cease to be,
But to be as they reinvent me.
A monster.