Ode To Bram Stoker Poem by John Lars Zwerenz

Ode To Bram Stoker

Our sanguine hearts, they crave true peace,
And so our carriage sallies forth
To the regions of the mystic north,
To the rocky shores of Whitby's sand,
Where Stoker wrote his masterpiece,
Hidden in that haunted land.

Did you all not know
That every monster in embryo
Is borne from an ill played piano?

Its airs do spread like vampire wings
Over poorly protected, humble things.

And when the wild harbor glows at night
With an odious, translucent, ominous light
The old, glass panes of Saint Mary's bestow
Reds morose upon the doomed archipelago
Warning us all of what exists down below.

And Stoker, drunk, over his morbid manuscript,
Attempts to raise Lucifer's clan.

Saved or sullied, kept or ripped,
He hands the pages to the swallowing, tan
Dusk that has taken his psyche to the east,
To the Northern Sea, that boundless beast
Filled with hungry Sirens, all craving blood;

Their teeth, as ivory as the Roman colonnades,
Their hearts, colder than the freezing Celtic glades,
Fill Stoker's ink well of an all consuming flood -
Of a despair far darker than of Dante's mind.

For literary fancy has become unkind
And worse than real -
Which no desperate dawn can appease nor reveal
The slightest possibility of hope.

And the author does wail
As he flees to the end of a tightly wound rope. -
Dare you place your dear self in this horrible tale?

John Lars Zwerenz

Taken From John Lars Zwerenz
The Complete Anthology
Released February 14,2020