our hypothetical
Subconscious mind Dracula
Dracula is real! good lord!
How do we understand it
It is life you have founded
Death’s mythology on, when
Your substance demands Get
Out of that umbrella now
Right now.
And now you are brushing yr teeth
With the language, trying to get
The decay out of the classical music
That lurks behind each evident crime
Every clumsy seduction of falseness
And mechanical simpering pride that
Moves like a film across the eyes
Distorting the incredible color of
Summertime on crowded sands
An unashamed obvious bur-
Lesk moving like a sloppy
Sneak thief in the dreams
Floating like sunlight into an awful
America white and unhappy as drawn
by a dull artist who lusts and his
Creations for the darkness of blood
And insane crime. But it’s a crime
What he’s doing and beyond statute
THIS IS A WORK OF ART no matter how
Unnecessary it remain to our flesh
■
These last lines of it spoken by the midnight doctor
And left hanging in the flat air over the station
To be snatched by the violent train of his thoughts
Suspended sentences drawing sighs from the placid
Snake tooth mouth of our Dracula. Changes his form
Assumes an entire jury of peering witnesses walking
Deliberately like negroes on the street,
And then the strict transformation rabble
Screaming and waving pockets torn off
The most respectable fences in the town
A lynch mob. Simple. This is nothing
With symbols except the holy mystery of
Our people in this country today. God
Have charged them with the presence of the unwanted
The necessary black negro and this is the way
Our people bear their judgment
There is no release in the songs
Their music is dying They try to steal
Heat for the beautiful instruments again
The black ones learn to play these
Machines but they leave our people screaming
Silence Nothing happens. More nothing and
The loss of the land hangs in the air
A rotten rapist. Stomach full of bloody
Advertising. Sculpture or is it dance
The hanging orchards of America but our
People are so ashamed. The signs alter
Our cities serving the sacrament negro
Motion and feelinglanguage logic blood
The jig. Boss. Silent, it is without Dracula’s
Ease he sucked from the ersatz florentine walls
Something is yet lacking in our people’s religion
Said the doctor at midnight
Speaking their own language at that
■
Rejection and the knowledge it is a sense of loss
We lack, that only such emotion could complete us
When we are tired of our thoughtful survival and
Cry to be married to a cringing darkness and capture
It in our own souls. Petty lunacy of each stilled
Evening in some totally unremarkable place, under-
Stand that as the torture of our rapturous manners
The white glitter of our impressive table
Manners and thoughts that go nowhere after
All we are content to have surround us and
Lift up to the light of our language and
Sip thoughtlessly of the ravishing cup marked
With a brand name of the thing we have used
To identify ourselves on this surprised earth
Minion. The register of surprise at some awkwardly
Pretentious demand
breaking up all over again
the expectation of some
orderly form
The Cross crucifix
back
in the same Dracula
story
To have been saying, Dracula is a real person
A man
and any Art that depends for sub-
stance
there, the human
must end in pieces
appropriate
