Simon MacCulloch
Minotaur
………….The maze has no center
………….The monster is nowhere
Orange-baked brick of the sausage-chopped houses,
Mapless and minding their undiscussed business,
Gridding a zone where the heat-stink of man-bulls
Loiters at corners and trembles in trash bins,
Hinting at butcheries, cleavers or muzzles
Gored with the juices of soap opera gossip,
Dripping the heartaches of TV Times martyrs.
Frayed where he loops ’round the lampposts at corners,
Taut where he stretches down intricate alleys,
Spider-thread hero conforms to the pattern,
Straying, redoubling in search of his snapping,
Twisting himself through the labyrinth’s winding,
Looking for love in advertisement jingles,
Lost in the plot of the blood-scenting snuffling.
………….This, then, is nowhere
………….This is the monster
_______________
Simon MacCulloch lives in London and has published poetry in a variety of print and online venues, including Reach Poetry, The Collidescope, Aphelion, The Horror Zine, Dreams and Nightmares, View from Atlantis, Altered Reality, Spectral Realms, The Literary Hatchet, Pulsebeat Poetry Journal and others.
Author’s Notes and Backstory: This poem is one of a series in which I present a surrealistic re-imagining of the London suburb in which I grew up in the 1960s. The council housing estate that formed its residential heartland, a sprawling narrow-lane maze consisting mainly of small two-story terraced houses in orange brick built in the 1920s, is here associated with the labyrinth of the Minotaur legend, whose core of butchery reflects the sense of routine, ingrained violence that the area inspired in me. The myth is degraded by being merged with the modern fiction of television soap opera to suggest the attenuation of individual identity that such an environment may foster.
Editor’s Comments and Image Citations: There’s a particular rhythm of evenly spaced stresses in these hendecasyllabic lines (11 syllables). Each line begins with a stress and ends with an unstress, in effect augmented anapests. I imagine there’s more than one way of doing the scansion of these lines; however, to me they appear as a stress followed by an anapest, an standard anapest, and an anapest followed by an unstress. And there are names 4-syllabic feet (see meter in poetry in Wikipedia) so that the line’s rhythm could be marked off as: Dum dah dah Dum, dah dah Dum, dah dah Dum dah or the three feet can be called chloriamb, anapest, tertius paeon, resp., terms I’ll likely never remember. Image credit: Microsoft Designer with input “crime-infused London depicted as a minotaur’s labyrinth.”