HEATHCLIFF-HUGHES II

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Hareton Earnshaw

Heathcliff’s Refuge

Heathcliff’s Ghost

Heathcliff’s Demeanor

Heathcliff’s Mansion

Heathcliff’s Surrender

Heathcliff’s Lament

Humpy Heathcliff

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Hareton Earnshaw

The mansion was a wharf—

A grand landing on the moors

Big barges listed and sank—

Shackled to the gloomy dock

Apparently indestructible—

The sea shedding its snake-skin

The pulsing grass-tops—

Washing up like some tide

The owner in a straitjacket—

Hiding, button-holed inside

The pier’s pilings buffeted—

The edifice built on storms

The waves gossiping secrets—

Loose vernacular whisperings

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Heathcliff’s Hideaway

Further out the whitecaps—

The moors mossy icecaps

No warehouses, derricks—

No smokestacks, bridges

No ice-crippled ships—

No relic wrecks grounded

Only the flowing wave-tips—

Endless moors grass-tops

Ferrying the wind and—

Dead lovers and ghosts

Hareton Earnshaw—

Outmoded, gaudy, grand

Over the desolate landscape—

Heathcliff-Hughes getaway

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Heathcliff’s Ghost

I entered the chilly no-man’s—

Land early in the evening

The dark void of the moody moors—

An obscure lunar dreamscape

Later it would become even more—

Profoundly much more dreamlike

It was a ready-made bunker—

Waiting for Berlin to fall

It was a home of fading apparitions—

Dracula ghosts behind the curtains

The lurking look on Heathcliff’s face—

Already emblazoned with farewell

As I shook his gnarled hands—

Our two incompatible worlds met

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Heathcliff’s Demeanor

Speaking in the sign language—

Of a sleeping lost other world

A world I’d soon lose waking up—

Twisted in the sheets of a dream

I must have fainted at the steps—

Entering the Mytholmroyd manse

I was cold and weak after my—

Journey to stark Hareton Heights

I woke up with exclamation marks—

Ringing in my puzzled ears

A telltale fever trailing me—

An ungodly sickness fagging me out

The rocky grizzled gizzard of the land—

Had dumped me at Heathcliff’s door

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Heathcliff’s Mansion

God knows how I got there—

Through the wasted cold wet moors

A pale orange stellar carroty sun—

Having slowly been displaced by fog

I was suspended in druidic time—

At least the moon felt that way

As if the Point of No Return—

Had come and gone at last for me

An evil kind of strange cuckoo day—

With no beginning or ending

Replaced by some kind of ghostly—

Haughty hieroglyphic temple

Instead of finding my Landlord—

It seems as if he had found me

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Heathcliff’s Surrender

I felt like a slithery hot dog—

Split, sizzling by the sea

Under the boardwalk—

A body washed up ashore

Smelly nowhere salt flats—

Dark sunshine down on me

A gull flock flapping overhead—

Checking me out on the sand spit

I was stone-deaf, beached—

My body the sea’s garbage

I smoldered, slowly rotting—

Flies flew out of my eyehole

They buzzed in and out of—

My empty brainless head

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Heathcliff’s Lament

I had no right to be there—

A full moon lapsing over the moors

Inconveniencing my Landlord—

With my shameless skullduggery

How dare I choose his castle—

Throwing myself in the moat’s drink

The mansion’s turrets overhead—

My lollygagging nadir far below

My slumber felt ponderously—

Heavy in the boudoir’s big bed

Thank gawd there was plenty—

Of good sherry and Russian caviar

And a close-by bubbling hookah—

To alleviate my suffering pansy ways

While the ice-hearted wind outside—

Maddeningly beat against the windows

Humpy Heathcliff

He considered himself an oracle—

Mealy-mouth Mouthpiece of the dead

Only twenty years old—

Quite young for a reclusive Landlord

He crawled into bed with me—

He smelled worse than a barnyard

He proceeded to smack his lips—

Mule-bray, pig-grunt, horse-whinny

I was never together after that—

Disjointed, unglued, disemboweled

But that’s how I got to know him—

Heathcliff-Hughes my Landlord

What a cornucopia of a man—

In my left ear, out the other