Poems From Providence - The Poet's Press

waiting for the bat,
the creeping mist,
the leaping wolf
the caped, lean stranger.
Lulled by the lap of curtains, the false
sharp scuttle of scraping leaves,
I knew the night as the dead must know it,
waiting in caskets, dressed
in clothes that no one living could afford to wear.
The river town of blackened steeples,
vile taverns and shingled miseries
had no appeal to Dracula. Why would he come
when we could offer no castle,
no Carfax Abbey, no teeming streets
from which to pluck a victim?
My life — it seemed so unimportant then —
lay waiting for its sudden terminus,
its sleep and summoning to an Undead
sundown. How grand it would have been
to rise as the adopted son of Dracula!
I saw it all:
how no one would come to my grave
to see my casket covered with loam.
My mother and her loutish husband
would drink the day away at the Moose Club;
my brother would sell my books
to buy new baseball cards;
my teachers’ minds slate clean
forgetting me as they forgot all
who passed beneath and out their teaching.
No one would hear the summoning
as my new father called me:
Nosferatu! Arise! Arise! Nosferatu!