Horror Matinee

(Helgi Halldorsson)

Renfield:

Whither Dracula? Where indeed!?
Where are the Z-grade starlets you need
To scream and scream again
And bleed?
Those clods in boots to stake their claim
Twixt starlets’ Legs
And in your heart?
Where thou art?

Helsing:

A mirror on the table, a picture window.
Sunlight streams…A golden cross and a vicar’s dreams.
A holy chant. The vestibule.
You withstand all but ridicule.
You belong to a crueler age
When gothic treats crowded the stage
And children fretted in the dark

Vampyre:

And welcomed terrors light rendered stark.
The moon, for example, is a perfect shape.
Why does it not bring one a lover?
Roaming over the dreary nightscape
Dully, a searchlight in a cheap-jack gaol.
Can it not hunt in tune with the fixed cat’s wail?
The moon is a lovely nightlight but you cannot read by it,
Or turn blind in the trying
As Homer fiddled, Diogenes unkempt and sun watching.
It is no fun, the moon; an evil eye fit for fretting by.
One cannot get up to anything when
It hangs in the corner of the sky, A pipsqueak conscience.

Renfield:

But better surely, than the joyless sun
By which a raft of visions
Compound in one.

Vampyre:

‘Tis so lonely in the suburban streets at midday,
The people (if any) are occupied in town.
Look around and see the gardens deserted
And imagine a perfect murder
And think in a fleeting moment that
The day is always best for horror stories…

Helsing:

The shelf-life of the rotten ends
When the harsh sunlight descends.

Vampyre:

The black water holds so many terrors, surely
But it gleams romantic in the softened glow,
sub mare in the daytime is a tub of old cold sweat –
That white fin in the sun which cuts a swathe
Through sea and bodies
As screams rise and bubbles don’t,
Muse for a quiet moment that
The day is always best for horror stories…

Harker:

One? Two? Three? … Sauve-qui-peut!

Vampyre:

Night time in the desert can be mournful
And the creepy-crawlies all emerge to feed,
A gentle breeze (if any) whispers softly in the sand
But the morning brings the knowledge
Of your footsteps disappearing
And a limitless horizon
Spreading out with a sort of humor
And it strikes one that this
Is the light in which we do the danse macabre.

Harker:

Grandfather, grandfather, please don’t die now.
Please say ‘Velcome’ as you tuck me in,
Please swish your cape and give me a kiss.
Your love is not moribund.
Don’t touch those green bottles — for insects, not bats,
Don’t appear in this, say we who love you, your reputation;
We know times are lean and of late you’re unseen
But memories survive these horrors of decline…
Let’s go for a drive; where shall we drive?
Somewhere they know you,
Let’s go to the pictures,
You know, one of your old ones,
Grandfather hold on

Vampyre:

Kindly attempt not to contact me,
I’ve nothing I wish to discuss
And I’m all acted-out for expository notes,
The fire is too pale for the fuss.