Doctor Amy Herridge's Cabinet of Vampiric Maladies: An Introduction
For those who wish they could sustain
Beyond their natural time,
I must implore you think again
With this most gruesome rhyme.
A scientist by trade I am,
And this you'll shortly see;
For all these wretched cases
First entreated cures from me.
We have first here our friend Jerome,
Our youngest patient yet.
If he could speak instead of groan
You'd know his great regret.
In 1931, you see,
No one was scared of lead.
Had Jerome known, like you or me,
He'd not wish to be dead.
Two tumors became fifty,
And then those were eighty-nine—
And would you guess, would you believe,
The first one was benign?
We move on through our exhibition;
of these sorry souls,
Whose quests for immortality
Took catastrophic tolls.
So don't mind Mrs. Willow,
As she's laid up on the floor.
Unlike some of her fellows,
She's no trouble anymore.
We're not quite sure what happened,
But one day she just forgot—
Her name, her age, her origin—
We couldn't do a lot.
And don't bother feeling sorry.
As you knew when you arrived,
Every creature brought in for me
Here is very much alive.
See for yourself: open an eye
And watch her pupils change;
Or pick an artery and feel
The blood run weak and strange.
We must move on; we've bothered her
Enough for just one day.
And so I show you one other,
A man of stone and clay.
He sits like marble Mars in Rome,
But thus your eyes deceive;
'Neath frozen flesh and twisted bone
He tries his best to breathe.
I lead you to my favorite,
Our last one of the day:
My single most unfortunate,
A man whom I call 'Ray.'
Raymond, as he is better known,
Was on a hunting trip.
He brought his horses, hounds, and horn
And made a deadly slip.
After the struggle with the fox,
His dog behavéd strange.
He thought perhaps it was a pox,
Consumption or a mange.
But it was none. It was a rage
Untreated at the time;
And Ray's case was so interesting
I had to make him mine.
You see him seize, as he has done
Since he was brought to me.
When was that? In the distant year
Of 1963!
It is my hope that my account
Most thoroughly perturbs;
That you will not deprive the Earth
Of what is rightly hers.
My patients, cursed though they may be,
Have woven their own strife:
They all behavéd selfishly,
And clung too long to life.
Your body is a borrowed thing
And Mother Earth keeps track.
Be not surprised when comes the day
She wants her fodder back.
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