Lucrece's Revenge

A response sequel to Shakespeare's "The Rape of Lucrece"

A self-loathing of an undeserved impurity,

Darkness seeps from a fatal wound invisible to all.

Wounds still visible to her within a tempest,

Blackened images raging in jeers and insanity's lust.

Innocence impaled on a sword belonging only to a man,

Filth of betrayal and a coward's strength,

Keeping an ever lasting taint inside vivid memories.

Pleads of forgiveness and understanding are cast out as the self hate wins the war.

An angered father and an enraged husband,

Both kinsmen to the demon and deceived by the beast.

Hound and man investigate the shadows,

Sniffing and searching vile darkness for the insult on mankind.

Torches casting a blood-hued glow over street and wood,

Swords unsheathed and halberds raised.

A city wakes in a pulse of bloodlust and madness.

The coward's tiring feet follow after one another,

Distancing from the scene of bleeding guilt and insane betrayal.

Voices of angels and fiends roar and shout behind sad eyes,

A swelling regret and hatred blooming inside his hollow heart.

Hell's Princes roar of adultery and gluttony in pride,

Angels shout of sin and suffering in anguish.

Two sides whose arguements only tire the wretch.

Soliders and farmers quest side-by-side,

Tracking the path and trail of the hunted beast in determination.

A father's loss of daughter, of eye's apple feeds his persistence,

Widow's loss of wife, betrayal of brother nurishes his aim.

Two men following a set of footprints,

Impressions created in the heaviness of Hell's possession.

Two hunters with the fury and relentlessness of justice as their lances.

The black-hearted Hollow collapses in agony,

No mortal wounds scarring the skin but knives carve out the whispered jeers anyways.

Splintered fingernails scratch at the flesh,

Desperation in trying to undo the wrong that this body has done.

Animalistic whimperings and mutterings whine out in pleadig,

A lost soul aware of how cast from the path he has become.

Scratching becomes tearing as desperation turns to psychotic loathing.

Warriors, guardians of justice, reach the end of their path,

But before them is neither man nor demon.

A beast of no thought or mind cries in dirt and twig,

Reasoning and mental capacity lost in anguish and deserved self-mutilation.

Rope and shackles are bound to Hell's newest pet,

Punishment just beyond the horizon with the Sun's dawn.

A new scene to the wretch's life, the last curtain call.

Stones breach flawed skin in crimson blossoms,

Spoiled vegetables casting a spray of foul juices over stinging wounds.

Both husband and father of Lucrece stand to either side,

Both with sword in hand and item of Lucrece's possession around the hilt.

Father; a pendant of family heirloom wrapped around steel gauntlet,

Husband; a wedding ring of the purest gold with engraved sweet nothings.

A nod between the two as the enraged crowd undergoes a spell of silence,

Both men step forward to the Demon Tarquin in grim, cold silence.

The wretch screams and wriths in pain as Lucrece's vengeance is fulfilled......