This piece is based on the Native American legend of the Wendigo, a mythological, man-eating creature or evil spirit that originated in the Algonquian tribes of southeastern Canada.
Have you ever found yourself hungering alone?
Hateful pain bound like knots within your guts
Has it eaten away at your nerves and reason?
Surely you know what becomes of such agony
Deep within the copse of cold lies the answer
When your hunger beyond your very own sanity
In that moment it comes, the craving of flesh
Whether your own or attached to an unfortunate soul
These decrepit thoughts tease with grim delight
Rivers of red running and tainting the pure white snow
The tearing of flesh between frantic hands
Thoughts so dark, yet enchanting to a mind on its own
From the depths of the forest, among skeletal trees and dead brush
Through blinding sheets of pelting ice and snow
You soon come face to face with Hunger made manifest
The very spirit of winter and malice, titan of starvation
It looms over your pitiable form as owls bore witness from afar
Ragged ash grey skin, stretched taut over haunting bones
Antlers stained with bright crimson blood
Its sunken eyes boring into your very heart
All hope of resisting it, any shred of fleeing is gone
It left you as this beast of anomalous nature sat
Horrors yet to come, you shout defiance aloud towards it
A futile gesture, as you would soon know
Soon enough it answers your taunts of desperation
First in the voice of your father, then the mother, even brothers
Your lover, your closest friends, all loved ones dearest
An unspoken anguish of the heart as it speaks in the likeness of the dead
Upon its haunches among the churned-up ice it sits
Its maw dripping in fresh gore, your flesh in clawed hands
A meal you have become, consumed beyond recognition
Licking its fanged lips before rising to the scent of another tortured soul
The hunger that never rests, the twisted spirit of the Wendigo
