that rule them
Since I can’t have you
I will steal what you have
Dracula
DRACULA
Crosses his blond eyes to think of you
Picks up his brown overnight bag and
Runs down the ash covered streets to the station
Scuffles with the ignorant ticket agent
Leaps on the bus as it belches forward
Passengers seeping into the dark
The city is obliged to be dark
And mysteriously desolate under
Ritualized demands of departure
The foolish moon of your care and
Coins filtering through his sheer pockets
A shroud with pockets cape
His personal state of permanent transit
Covered with decals where he ever mailed
His possessions This is serious business.
A brand new black greatcoat neatly folded
Over his naked arm the dance of human fluid
“Blood” in more polite times. The tattoo
Remarkable and genteel,
Pictures of mountains
And soft undistinguished
Rivers in his hand Across his dry palm
bus ticket dup-
lication designs
The awkward sneer impinging on his nez
This particular
Place
Dracula depicted in venetian half- light
dissolving boundaries of his presence:
Dracula your white faces
against the night
Hair falling back
over your faces
formula STORY
Personal history to that man was particular
Actual form and the descriptive logic of it
The word he thought it was
Was death, was the stiffened sense
O the garments only a sob story
That we could say here was a person
And the person a loss to himself
How strange how strange. The bed-
Room of the most facile delusions
And the clothing edging the plump door
A frighteningly ponderous human body
Suddenly the face of Charles Baudelaire
Crushing on the television screen
Waking the thick solitude of common-
Place individual people. Confused
Lost. A man whose heritage and biography was death
He said so
Past back
in the mornings
And demanding this song with your content
From me, the personal to be what person
History of a single man you are completely
Yes, but who are you
■
Start the thing over again:
DRACULA is not a myth but
Just another cheap novel
Written in the boring 18th
19th century made into the
Worst film of 1932 1958 and
Unless we get wise to our-
Selves next year over again
Then what is all this
Dracula is real Dracula is real!
ESSAY The demands of the loving human flesh
substance
A man and himself.
European habits
Colorless eyes filling the empty sleeves
Of the earth, another Slavic conception
After we keep on asking, What is that in the gypsy
language
What is that thing we no longer discover
Effective about our own faces in the glass
Underneath the B♭ chandelier
The final odors of our dinner in person
Shudder in the monotonous drawing room
Still you have nothing else to amuse you
It compels. It compels
The imprint of his RNA
On physical objects and
Space he insists on it,
Insists he has been dead
Over 300 years and we
Suggest we believe it
After the trance we put
On
