My Earlier Life as a Vampire

Blauer Spaziergang - Blue Walk 38,5 x 48,5 cm pastel by Karin Goeppert

MY EARLIER LIFE AS A VAMPIRE

The first girl whose throat

I had designs on was one

of our baby sitters. Her plump

pale neck was studded with pretty moles.

So whenever she blushed or flushed

I felt like an oil man scratching the

sand at the edge of an oasis, simply dying

to sink my drill into that rich lode. Yes, there were

teeth marks, but I swear, your honor, I

drew not one drop of her sweet blood.

Being older now, deeply mired in middle-age, I’m over

all that, and yet…I’d go for Anne Hathaway

in a pulse beat when she plays amorous Jane Austen  

long alabaster throat exposed in gowns plunging perilously

or as Meryl Streep’s factotum (deeply V-necked sweaters)

or fetchingly short-haired Liv Tyler (all lips, eyes, but mainly neck)

in a Robert Altman flick set in the South. Ethics? I’m a connoisseur

not a philosopher—well, not really—philosophy has its attractions—

or some philosophers, anyway—the vandals, the belligerents—

and I probably won’t get a stake in the heart

so much as a classic spike heel, or its contemporary cousin

the muddy cleat of her soccer shoe. But not even that

will happen. I’ve retired. I’ll have to be satisfied with scrambled

eggs flame-thrown with tabasco, reading Nietzsche till dawn burns through my curtains.

Rosario in Gardenfever

Gartenfieber III - Gardenfever III acryl on canvas 100 x 80 cm

THE AUDITORS

                                                Now as at all times I can see in the mind’s eye…

                                                             The uncontrollable mystery of the bestial floor.

                                                                           from THE MAGI, W.B. Yeats

I see them even now

in the green light of laptops and tablets

spread sheets scrolling down their pale faces

wasted on caffeine, lips thin and dry and chapped, never

satisfied, oh yeah, that’s them, always wanting what I

don’t want to give them, like junior vampires in search of

a little fresh plasma. Gray or blue suits not quite fitting properly,

handed down, it would seem, from an equally geeky sibling

who’s worked his way up to partner by now, grasping the ins

and outs of VAT far better than he will ever grasp 

the constantly mutating needs of his wife

and who, in fact, is on the verge of leaving him for a

bar tender from Montenegro—but that’s

another story; and the women,

nerdy, snorting, with strangely sour breath,

some of them unconsciously cute

packed hard-bodied in their pin-stripe suits, stealing

from the fourth floor kitchen fridge, and without a twinge of remorse,

half of some stranger’s turkey sandwich. In the Zone finally, eyes

unraveled in cold, unflinching stare, she finds again and again

in the turbulence of ingeniously fudged figures

those controllable mysteries of the bestial executive floor.