The chain between your ankles clanks upon each creaking stair
As you ascend from cellar depths through shadowed drops to where
I lie behind my bedroom door. A cartoon ghost, you seem,
Come dragging from a TV tale to shamble through my dream
Then out the waking end, with chains a-rattling, bones stripped bare.

No doubt you have a story of your own; it isn’t mine,
And if you have a role for me it’s one I must decline.
I’ve never been a Montresor, a Scrooge is not my style,
(I may not lack the malice but I surely lack the guile).
I hide no guilt of which a ghost might form the outward sign.

Well, yes, there’ve been some peccadilloes (now you’ve reached the landing),
But nothing on the scale I sense your bloody bones demanding.
The murders I have dreamed of I have quailed from in the doing,
The chances I have missed the only fuel for my rueing.
There’s nothing you can lay before the door at which you’re standing.

And yet this door is opening slowly – slowly in you come,
Your grin as final as the grave, your empty skull as dumb,
Your only sound the rusty crepitation of the chains
That drape the fleshless network of your hollowed-out remains.
There’s nothing in you – mine the depths your pitted sockets plumb.

And now I grasp your import, and I shake with joy and dread.
For what was it that Shakespeare’s Earl, in dark foreboding, said?
“Such things” (our present seeds) “become the hatch and brood of time”.
And thus I birth the spectre of my destiny in crime.
Strike off your chains – my deeds to come will raise you by their dead!

*****

Simon MacCulloch writes: “As Yet Not Come to Life” takes as its starting point an image that terrified me as an infant. It was in a televised, animated adaptation of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol – at one point, the ghost of Marley is shown mounting a staircase  towards Scrooge’s room, and we are shown only the skeletal lower legs as they slowly ascend the steps, inhibited by shackles round the ankles. This image became the main focus of my typical childish bedtime fears for a long while afterwards and has never been quite forgotten. I hope to take it to my grave, though not just yet.”

‘As Yet Not Come to Life’ was first published in Pulsebeat Poetry Journal.

“Simon MacCulloch has published hundreds of poems in a variety of outlets, including literary, academic, genre, humorous and religious publications. He lives in London. His Lovecraftian sonnet sequence, The Eyes of Azathoth, is due from Jackanapes Press in October 2026.

“Marley with Chains figurine” by Peter E. Lee is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.