The Intruder
Ken L. Jones
A terrible thing one Christmas Eve and not the first one neither
It seems some maniac had been going around killing families
By the score and doing it with a meat cleaver
Now the screaming and the chopping sounds
Aroused the neighbors from their celebrations and their slumbers
And when the police finally came around
Their eyes popped out of their heads
They quite bulged out in wonder
The whole inside of the Whitmore living room had been redecorated
Painted a human blood red and all of its inhabitants
Were now deceased and separated from their heads
And only one person was still a’stirring
And the police caught him soon in fact
It was a fat old man with a snow white beard
Carrying a large present filled sack
Now the story he told them made no sense
It involved toys, elves, reindeers, and a sleigh
And his fingerprints came up blank
And he wouldn’t admit to any normal provable name
He claimed that the place was just like that
When he came upon the scene
And that he was just about to summon the authorities on the phone
When they arrived and mistaken him for the fiend
Now as always the cops decided
To ramrod this case right through
In their light speed rush to judgment
And since the old man couldn’t afford decent representation in the courts
He soon found himself guilty as charged
At least that was the handed down decision
Now a date for his execution soon was set
And he lost every badly applied for appeal
And then when the fateful day had arrived at last
He asked for cookies and milk as his last meal
Now all through this he stuck to his story
And protested his innocence loud and long
But since the murders had stopped
After his capture everyone was soon satisfied
That the true killer was about to hear the executioner sing his song
And so they dragged him to the electric chair and then they strapped him in
Then they asked him if he had any last words
And he only muttered, “Christmas will never be the same again.”
Now this was in June and by the following December
Something seemed to be missing
And on that all could agree
But it wasn’t evident exactly what that was
Till Christmas morning when there were no presents beneath any tree
All the stockings were empty
The toymaker’s snacks untouched
And it was the same every year after that
And the finality of all this had turned the whole world glum
And made Christmas seem kind of flat
For without Santa Claus what is Christmas time
Why it’s hardly any fun at all
And because of that very salient fact
There were fewer and fewer decked halls
And so it turned out that Kris Kringle was now long gone
A victim of justice gone awry and now he lies
In a John Doe unmarked grave in a potter’s field
And no more does he travel through the sky
Now people still celebrate Christmas but with little joy
And each year the children shed tears of remorse and regret
For Saint Nick had been given fifty thousand bolts
Because they had mistakenly thought he was a severer of human heads.
Revenge
(A Concerto In Gingerbread)
Ken L. Jones
One night in a hausfrau’s house
While making her homemade Christmas cookies
She chanced her finger to prick on a craving knife
And the sight it wasn’t pretty
Now some drops of blood from it
They shot right out and landed on a cookie tin
Where a gingerbread man was cooling off
And it gave quite a shower to him
And in that second a miracle occurred
One that befit the season
As the gingerbread man sprang to life and sentience
And then was on his way
And soon out in a world so strange to him
He found that he was cast
And since he smelled and looked so good
Everyone wanted to gobble him right down as he streaked past
And so to prevent himself from losing life and limb
He defended himself with much vigor and such fierceness
And in the process found that he had a taste for human flesh
When he bit off one of his attacker’s fingers
Now the symmetry and justice of all this quite appealed to him
And so he continued with his human feasts
And soon amassed quite a body count
And the world soon became scared of him
Now he felt quite justified in doing so
Because after all generations of gingermen by humans
Had been gobbled up at Christmas time and without cease
And so the tables were turned at last on all mankind
And he continues till this day to munch on unsuspecting folks
When he lays in wait for them upon their plate
Now there’s no way to tell him from any similar treat
So watch out the next time one is served to you
For though you might think you’re about to wolf down a gingerbread man
He might be waiting to do the same exact thing to you
About the Poet: Although he has been writing professionally for over thirty years and does every kind of writing you can imagine from comic books to doctoring movie scripts Ken L. Jones considers himself first last and always a poet which doesn’t mean that he doesn’t find time to write a lot of horror and other genre style short stories too.
Read more of his poetry, including several more holiday poems at Ken's page on this blog here:http://georgewilhite.blogspot.com/p/poetry-by-ken-l-jones.html
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