Jen's Ripper Poems

[babybird67]

Mitre Square


Square of shadows, gas-light dying
Softly on the half-life lying
In the blood-pool, drenching, dyeing
Senseless stones a scarlet shame.

Crimson cobbles always taunting,
Fuseli’s Nightmare hovers, haunting,
Man or monster, ever vaunting,
Will we ever know his name?

Ripper’s Corner? Always fated
To commemorate his hatred?
Scene of slaughter where he sated
Misogyny - his vicious game.

Demon presence in our dreaming;
Out of reach, the silent screaming
Echoes absence ever-seeming
Dissonance, a Devil’s fame.

Softly sigh the winds of history
Whispering the ageless mystery.
Murder at the monastery:
Sacred site whence evil came.

Nocturne of a nightmare creeping;
Watchman’s slumber, city sleeping.
Bulls-eye lamp of Watkins peeping
Purblind eye of feeble flame.

Trinity of exits; chances
Lost in Destiny’s cruel dances;
Enter here where Jack advances,
First to murder, then to maim.

Once where Death was tacit, looming,
Vibrant croci now are blooming;
Resurrection unassuming -
Catherine’s ghost the Square reclaims.

Square of shadows dissipated,
Fate of common Woman feted;
Scales of history firmly weighted
In her favour: know her name.

[babybird67]

Dark Annie

Dark Annie


The warming radiation of the baked potato’s heat
I still feel it in my stomach; my lowly last meal.
So much walking…all for pennies. I am working Dorset Street;
I am too old for this life. My boots fragmenting round my feet,
Soles worn thin from this traversing on these broken heels.
I conceal myself in shadows to avoid the Bobby’s beat.


My bruised and battered body from the quarrel with my friend
Makes its way into the darkness, to make one last sale.
Importunate to my family, up to Vauxhall I did wend
And after much beseeching they consented me to lend
Five pennies for some bed and board; my body deathly pale
As I took those fearful, fateful steps towards my violent end.


The little worms of worries creep and crawl into my mind
And consume my body; corpse-like, I walk a half-life.
How quotidian and petty seem the problems I would find;
How pointless all the fighting and the vicious words unkind,
The struggle and the scramble and the conflict and the strife
Of this corporeal travail that now unravels and unwinds.


The soporific somnolence of alcoholic daze
I crave, my normalised narcotic. Addicted I
Waste my lodging money over in my dissolute ways,
Fated to take this dissipated journey in the haze
Of swirling sable fog beneath miasmic poisoned sky -
Just one more amongst the many of the lost and lonely strays.


To Hanbury Street I led him, to the quiet and the calm.
With the dusty daybreak dawning, in the yard we stood;
I knew him; had no terror nor no foreign fear of harm,
In his velvet voice I heard not a murmur of alarm.
In moments my form, throttled, would resound against the wood
The asphyxiated witness to the power of his palm.


And in my final moments when I knew my end was nigh
I remembered Mr Chapman, and our children; tears
Flooded into my heart yet had not time to stain my eye;
So silent soughed the sibilating shiver of my cry.
An end to all my illness and my worries and my fears
For as the East was waking I was weeping my goodbye.

[babybird67]

Bogeyman

Bogeyman

Alley‘s shadow fleeing, turning,
Blending blur into the night.
Fire-red blood in gutters burning,
Crimson proof of fiendish flight.
Body in the Row is tattered,
Ripped and ravaged, blood is spilled;
Walls and clothing ruby-spattered,
A beating heart once vibrant, stilled.
Horror, panic, fear is spreading
Wild and wicked through the streets;
Every girl and woman dreading
Every man she ever meets.
Is it he, the well dressed stranger,
Dressed in high hat, cape and silk?
Noble-born. The Devil, danger
From the gentry and their ilk?
Is it doctor, hands of healing
Turned to murder to betray
Hippocratic oath, all feeling
Blackened like the lack of day?
Could it be the humble worker,
Aproned butcher, glinting knives
Sharp and slicing, looming lurker
Making meat of human lives.
Every man potential suspect,
No man free from mistrust’s eyes;
Viral verminous to infect
Spitalfields with septic lies.
Could it be a force inhuman
Stalks the streets and haunts the land?
London East, its evil numen
Showing swift a demon’s hand,
Taking hold, searing sensation
Through collective consciousness,
Jack the Ripper’s Hell, damnation
Darkens doorsteps death -oppressed.
One who lingers, soft and quiet,
Single local unknown male,
Stands apart from godless riot,
Sight-obscured, the opaque veil
Of normalcy about his shoulders
Gently drapes, its folds conceal,
Forever to our history’s holders
Who he is: a ghoul surreal,
Leaving landscapes lowly urban
Mired and muddied from his grime;
Foggy footprints, stained suburban
Squares and streets in tainted crime.

[babybird67]

The Witness

The Witness


Stars and slither-moon suffused, occluded by a suffocating dark,
A dark that cloaks me, keeps me blinkered, as I step the lonely steps, before my cart.
My Master behind me, tetchy, tired and eager for his sleep,
Flicks the whip across my glistening skin, and the flickers of the firelight of imagination creep
Into my brain, as into the Yard we turn. I’m scared. There’s something…there, to my right,
The heat of human heart still dimly beating, eking itself away into the darkest, blackest night.
I shy, I whinny, my iron feet onto the sodden stones I pound…
I fret, I fray, I, frenzied, refuse to take a further step, I hold my ground.
A lurking spirit spooks me.. I sense in surly shadows Evil hides
Accompliced and assisted by the clouded, curtained skies.


A simple drunk inebriate? My Master gently prods the form collapsed inside the gate,
No longer even human, just residual remains from the Maelstrom of the hate
Unleashed this night inside the confines of this dark, despondent place,
Its impenetrable gloom black as blackest demon‘s face.
Pervasive panic gripped me in its cloying claws of dread,
Like the prey of powerful predator pinioned in the terror of her death.
I stood fearful, frightened, foaming, - fretting as the hue and cry ensued,
Dreaming just of hay, of stables, - sunshine, of my rest and of my food.
Yet I, the silent witness, saw him flee, for I had been
The only one there present who saw the Spectre in the scene.

[babybird67]

Graffiti

Graffiti

Chalked enigma, ciphered scrawl
Of cryptic clues upon a wall.
Double negatives are found -
A racist’s rampant rage abounds.
Passage etched by Goulston’s Ghoul
With spite of accusations cruel.
Splattered blood at PC’s feet.
A fiend will flee through Goulston Street.
Scribblings of suspicion creep
To consciousness while London sleeps.
Murmurs of malicious mind
Spread poison for the Force to find
With Machiavellian intent
Director of the Double Event.
Proof of Master-Puppeteer?
Pulling strings, engendering fear?
Or random words on random wall?
The enigma that signifies…

Nothing at all.

[babybird67]

Oblivion

Oblivion

Oh the bliss of oblivion deep,
The beautiful bounteous darkness of sleep;
Enveloping blackness - the nothing that calls,
And my languorous longing to fall.

Life, a bloodthirsty hunter and hounds,
It’s echoing emptiness eerie resounds
Like the horn of pursuit of a friendless foe,
That is bloodied with nowhere to go.

Oh the need of an utter collapse,
The desire, temptation, to let life lapse.
To submit, to surrender, to cease to fend,
And to joyously let it all end.

Oh the quarry all cornered and torn,
And mauled by its enemies, lonely, forlorn,
Why struggle on further, why strive so to fight
When inevitable comes the night.

Oh the hell of the torments inside;
Tumultuous Thames with her turbulent tides,
Come take my mortality down to your depths
As the waters close over my steps.

Oh the bliss of oblivion deep,
The beautiful bounteous darkness of sleep;
Enveloping blackness - the nothing that calls,
And my languorous longing to fall.

[babybird67]

Street Walker

Street Walker


She walks and wanders lonely road
With countless others of her kind.
She carries nothing: heavy load
Oppresses both her heart and mind.
Indolent soles of doleful feet
Traverse the pathways; all alone
Among the crowds which throng the street,
The open skies the Homeless’ home.
She passes by the spotless spire -
St Mary’s sacred steeple steep -
The silent songs of ghostly choir
Still sanctify while shadows creep
About the bodies of the damned
In Purgatory’s passage sprawled,
Down alleyways and doorways jammed,
Against the bricks where hatred’s scrawled.
A sale of flesh where souls are saved,
Her trudging mortal body wends
Along the byways cobble-paved,
Devoid of family and of friends.
With grasping claim of kissless lust
The vagabonds and vagrants raped
With careless, casual, callous thrust
The destitute are destined-shaped.
Among the reeking, ragged rags
The dressed are stripped in spirit bare,
The young despoiled, the maidens hags,
Their faces worn with wrinkled care.
The carnal fumble desecrates:
Her body bartered for a bed,
The cost of life within Hell’s Gates…
A glass of gin, a piece of bread.
The Chapel white, the borough black
A parish peppered with its sheep,
Most lost, no chance of turning back,
In droves drawn into death’s dull sleep.
She walks the way like thousands more
Yet step by step she walks alone;
The way her sisters walked before,
The nameless, shameless great unknown.

[babybird67]

The Painter

The Painter

Bedecked in lace and corsets, the showgirls catch my eye.
The modesty of social convention keeps them shy
But one, back to my studio, I invite, entice;
Come, girl, stripped you may be, yet this is no vice,
But Art, for which of you a model I shall make,
Your morals shall be sacrificed for my Art’s sake.
And colour-drained my canvas makes its mark,
The oils a drear drab daub upon the dark
Clouded conscience of the troubled mind;
Scratch the surface of the image - a mystery you will find.
Murky metaphors of menace darkly brood
Upon the sinisterly-shadowed showgirl, nude,
Spread for consumption on the bed for all to see -
Transmuted from her self into an emblem - Emily.

Narrowed perspective, like a coffin, drawing the eye
In to the subject, through the art darkly, where it can barely descry
The amorphous figure at the window blurred, my black device
Depicting Jack the Ripper’s Bedroom. Pale sacrifice,
The world‘s opprobrium, my reputation will I stake
As I paint a form from Hell through eye opaque.
An artist or a murderer? Posterity will remark
On whether the pessimism and the poverty, stark
Messages of my medium, are there to remind
The audience of the destitute and salacious kind
Of lives lived by my models, as they have been viewed
By an artist metamorphosing them from figures lewd,
Into the empathetic creatures of a lost humanity…
Or whether they are evidence that the murderer was me.

[Wyatt Earp]

Jen, these are fantastic. Thanks for posting them. I'm sorry to hear about the book falling through. Maybe someday there will be an anthology of Ripper-related short stories and poetry. These would look great in a volume like that.

[K-453]

Most impressing stuff I encountered for weeks.

[babybird67]

thank you guys

for your kind comments.

[Abby Normal]

Hi babybird
Beautiful.

I write poetry also and always wanted to write a poem relating to this tragedy but never have found the words.

But you have inspired me to try again.

[Abby Normal]

Mary Kelly

Dark city sidewalks bleed sweet parades
Scattered figures play a strange charade
I hear her singing from the shade
A lovely sad serenade

Her red hair
Her fair skin
Sweet the troubles of the soothing gin
She let him in

The angels wept cold tears of rain
But he just smiled and smiled again
I see him standing by the broken pane
From hell he is and come again

Her warm eyes
Her good heart
She was kindness in an unkind part
She’s a dark star

The fire glowed out its lonely light
To the courtyard of the night
And when it died-the devils sight
Beheld a bird on heavens flight

Mary Kelly
Sweet soul
Over green fields white clouds roll

[Beowulf]

beautiful.