Dracula Dreaming, etc.
By
Simon MacCulloch
Dracula Dreaming
Imagine a sea-sponge adrift in an ocean of blood:
Tumescently sated, it sails on crepuscular streams
Whose currents infuse it with luscious corpuscular dreams,
And bear it away on a rapturous carnalized flood
To cellular grottoes lit dimly by DNA gleams.
And here all the longings of life are aswarm, and they swell
In gobbling profusion like glittering poisonous fish
With teeth like piranhas and tails that brush suns as they swish
Through trans-stellar tide pools in search of the angel who fell
Still sizzling from paradise, fired like a flare by its wish.
And he is that angel, whose wings sweep the cosmos aflame,
Whose glory strikes dragon-clawed terror in God on His throne,
Whose wives are the wyverns, whose whims are a law cut in stone,
Whose fangs sunk in flesh will graffiti your heart with his name.
The universe rises, undead, and its corpse is his own.
They slay him at sunset. But something, perhaps, will survive:
That glimmer of bloody red triumph that caught in his eye
When, just for a moment, his dream became one with the sky,
And cloaked it in crimson, and kissed it profoundly alive.
One glimpse of desire, and the heavens ignite as you die.
Lilith
My tongue no longer laps the shape of god;
The sibilance of Lilith coils my breath
In serpent ghosts whose fangs conspire to fail
In forming names I recognise, and soon
Her brother owl will teach me how to pray
For things that cannot be expressed in words.
And things that cannot be expressed in words
Are cursed within the ambit of a god
Who used them when he told me what to pray
And multiplied their sense in fire-tongued breath.
The panoply of languages will soon
Attempt the indescribable, and fail.
And then the very mode of thought must fail,
For that is too dependent on these words
With which I must be finished very soon -
Old words, old thought, the province of a god
Whose logical conundrums staled the breath
And clogged the choking throat that tried to pray.
The kiss of lamia, a way to pray
When dim theistic structures fade and fail;
The drip of blood that stains the vampire breath
When incantations crumble with their words;
The succubus who scorns the seed of god -
No kingdom, but her time is coming soon.
The time of mother dark is coming soon,
When tight-strung harp-string nerves may deign to pray
An elegy upon the corpse of god,
And trill of catechisms damned to fail
Because their faith was founded on their words,
And words, perversions twisted out of breath.
So listen now, these final thoughts, this breath,
Whose bitter union is dissolving soon,
And see if you can find sufficient words,
Sufficient grounds of faith on which to pray
That somehow Lilith’s loving hiss will fail
In drooling death upon the dream of god -
The god who gave me breath with which to pray,
But soon must watch his cold schematic fail;
For words were but a dust, and words were god.
Wet Ghost
She’s a witch who was drowned on the ducking stool
But it’s air that she floats on here,
With her eyes wet caves where the shadows pool
And her mouth agape with the pond-scum drool,
And her shape the shape of fear.
When she comes to me through the rippling night
There’s a scent as of things long hidden,
And the dismal love that I can’t requite
Is a slimy tug that I try to fight
Like a dream that arrives unbidden.
There are storms at sea, there are storms on land,
There are storms that will flood the heart;
And I hope some day I shall understand
Why the fish-cold grip of a long-dead hand
Is a tie no remorse can part.
Simon MacCulloch lives in London and contributes poetry to Spectral Realms, Black Petals, Pulsebeat Poetry Journal, Altered Reality and many others.
By
Simon MacCulloch
Dracula Dreaming
Imagine a sea-sponge adrift in an ocean of blood:
Tumescently sated, it sails on crepuscular streams
Whose currents infuse it with luscious corpuscular dreams,
And bear it away on a rapturous carnalized flood
To cellular grottoes lit dimly by DNA gleams.
And here all the longings of life are aswarm, and they swell
In gobbling profusion like glittering poisonous fish
With teeth like piranhas and tails that brush suns as they swish
Through trans-stellar tide pools in search of the angel who fell
Still sizzling from paradise, fired like a flare by its wish.
And he is that angel, whose wings sweep the cosmos aflame,
Whose glory strikes dragon-clawed terror in God on His throne,
Whose wives are the wyverns, whose whims are a law cut in stone,
Whose fangs sunk in flesh will graffiti your heart with his name.
The universe rises, undead, and its corpse is his own.
They slay him at sunset. But something, perhaps, will survive:
That glimmer of bloody red triumph that caught in his eye
When, just for a moment, his dream became one with the sky,
And cloaked it in crimson, and kissed it profoundly alive.
One glimpse of desire, and the heavens ignite as you die.
Lilith
My tongue no longer laps the shape of god;
The sibilance of Lilith coils my breath
In serpent ghosts whose fangs conspire to fail
In forming names I recognise, and soon
Her brother owl will teach me how to pray
For things that cannot be expressed in words.
And things that cannot be expressed in words
Are cursed within the ambit of a god
Who used them when he told me what to pray
And multiplied their sense in fire-tongued breath.
The panoply of languages will soon
Attempt the indescribable, and fail.
And then the very mode of thought must fail,
For that is too dependent on these words
With which I must be finished very soon -
Old words, old thought, the province of a god
Whose logical conundrums staled the breath
And clogged the choking throat that tried to pray.
The kiss of lamia, a way to pray
When dim theistic structures fade and fail;
The drip of blood that stains the vampire breath
When incantations crumble with their words;
The succubus who scorns the seed of god -
No kingdom, but her time is coming soon.
The time of mother dark is coming soon,
When tight-strung harp-string nerves may deign to pray
An elegy upon the corpse of god,
And trill of catechisms damned to fail
Because their faith was founded on their words,
And words, perversions twisted out of breath.
So listen now, these final thoughts, this breath,
Whose bitter union is dissolving soon,
And see if you can find sufficient words,
Sufficient grounds of faith on which to pray
That somehow Lilith’s loving hiss will fail
In drooling death upon the dream of god -
The god who gave me breath with which to pray,
But soon must watch his cold schematic fail;
For words were but a dust, and words were god.
Wet Ghost
She’s a witch who was drowned on the ducking stool
But it’s air that she floats on here,
With her eyes wet caves where the shadows pool
And her mouth agape with the pond-scum drool,
And her shape the shape of fear.
When she comes to me through the rippling night
There’s a scent as of things long hidden,
And the dismal love that I can’t requite
Is a slimy tug that I try to fight
Like a dream that arrives unbidden.
There are storms at sea, there are storms on land,
There are storms that will flood the heart;
And I hope some day I shall understand
Why the fish-cold grip of a long-dead hand
Is a tie no remorse can part.
Simon MacCulloch lives in London and contributes poetry to Spectral Realms, Black Petals, Pulsebeat Poetry Journal, Altered Reality and many others.
