This week, I present a poem very much different from anything I’ve posted here before, one that was written more for fun than anything else. It is also one of the very few poems I’ve written that has no connection to Norse mythology and is not in a Norse poetic meter. Its form is rather that of an English (Shakespearean) sonnet.

It was inspired by the name of an obscure item in a video game called Dragon Quest V that my brother had been playing a while back: the Ghoulroarer. (The name, of course, is a modification of bullroarer, whether through a deliberate twist or an accidental mishearing.) After hearing the name, it occurred to me that I should write a poem about this fictional musical instrument. Also, for some time, I had it in my to-do list to write a sonnet. I thus mixed the two together and took the approach of treating the Ghoulroarer as though it were something that might have come from Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos. The poem is simply titled “The Ghoulroarer.”

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