Tom Bennett

Read in landscape mode!

The Hound of the Baskervilles

Here I shall end my dragon-breath days, scorched cave,
cursing the apocrypha that I’ll never set straight.

No chance now to claim the kills of yesterdays!
Laboratory men will mock my skeleton, speculate

about my belly’s contents in connection with the unaccounted-for
farmer’s son. Attribute it all to an Alsatian gone wrong.

Had they only seen me hunt by night, breenging at cattle,
foxes, the lost, their gods, they might know the sorcery

of my bones, whose souterrains I commando crawl, past cartilage,
past vein, to darkest space that neither they nor death will ever find.

About the Author

Tom Bennett is an English teacher living in London, originally from South Wales. His poems have appeared in Reed Magazine, Ink, Sweat and Tears, and others. His short fiction has appeared in Litro and Pushing Out The Boat.