I’ve always found great enjoyment in films that take the disaster movie idea and turn it into a ludicrous joke. Films like Megashark vs Giant Octopus, Sharknado, and 2012 are hilarious. I wanted to pay tribute to this very special type of film. My idea rapidly became the concept for an epic poem which I am currently working on. This is a story about the Avalarch; Part Avalanche, part Larch. It grows in secrecy in the heart of London, then breaks free to wreak havoc. Eventually, it is defeated but, like all good ridiculous disaster stories, it is soon back to face other monstrous beings.
This post contains part 1 of Avalarch. In this part of the epic poem, we watch strange and mysterious events unfold that lead to the creation of the greatest threat to London since the great fire.
Avalarch Part 1: First Mud
London doesn’t sleep, not quite
The light from every amber lamp
Reflects in fragments from the streets
That sheets of city rain made damp
The moon, half-hid by ashen clouds
Enshrouds the night in mystery
Illuminating hill and pit
A citadel of history
The Thames drifts by with murky grace
It’s face is grey with dirt and dark
A twisted trolley on the bank
Once thankless mule turned steel toothed shark
The ripples on the surface speak
Of bleak disturbances below
The wreckage of the city’s past
Lies fast beneath the undertow
The gentle trickle of the waves
That gravely stroke the crumbling wall
Heard only by the man in black
With sack and shovel as his haul
A crawl across the river muck
Legs stuck and sinking into mire
His hands and face with mud are packed
Though cracked, still like a mask entire
His body weary, aged, grey
A stray dog snuffles at his feet
It paws his leg, it starts to cry
Then finally accepts defeat
He drags himself up ladder rungs
And tongues of rust push through his hands
To taste his blood and slow his climb
From slime and mud and sucking sands
The top achieved, he stops to wheeze
His knees are trembling from the strain
Falls to the ground, his face is red
Then steadily he stands again
His eyes don’t speak so much as shout
A bout of coughing racks his chest
His job long done, he staggers home
To roam no more, at last to rest
A flutter from the traitor’s gate
A stately raven takes to flight
He rides the air with humble skill
A silhouette against the night
Big Ben chimes thrice his sonorous tone
A drone that gently shakes the sky
The bird drops to a window sill
And still the river slithers by
Swollen from the copious rain
It stains the bank with water lines
And laps the footprints in the clay
Erasing these, and other signs
A streak of bright fluorescent green
Here seen just momentarily
A tub of radioactive swill
Is spilling in the estuary
Through eddies, currents, ebb and flow
It slowly dissipates to spread
Some rises to the surface scum
And some sinks to the river bed
It seeps into the ground at last
Drawn past the banks and under soil
Into a garden, trickles through
The beauty bought by gardener’s toil
Exotic flowers, though lately bloomed
Consumed by filth, they wilt and die
But in the garden corner stand
The grand and glorious larches high
The trees succumb to waste and rot
But not the tallest, firm and wide
The dangerous drops through roots drawn in
Begin to change it from inside
This sole survivor drinking deep
While others die putrescently
For hours and days and months and years
It rears on up incessantly
And in due course, the others gone
Drawn on by time’s eternal march
It longs to rise from out the earth
The birth place of the Avalarch
No one would have believed in the first years of the twenty first century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greener than man’s and yet as mortal as his own
Ben's Bad Poetry 