30 – An open letter to the undead

[I was a member of “real-vampires · The Real-Vampires Community Alliance” in yahoo (don’t laugh). I posted a response, and realised that it was a poetic meditation. So I have another poem for my 100 poems of 2007.]

I just did a check, and my first post on this list was september 2000. Not long by all accounts, but not really new either. I stopped posting, though I read, twice for a couple of years each time, both because of what I felt, in my own up tight and idiosyncratic manner, was an excessive level of trite rehashing of previously unresolved revenant debates. I know that I’m the lunatic fringe (if that’s possible around such august lunatics (said with affection)) preferring the solitary sage to the covetous covens, the rippage to the RPG, and the structured discourse to the detritus. But forgiving me that, I take it as rote that when one is, ex officio, cast adrift with the baggage of vampirage that we accept a number of mutually incomprehensible positions that will allow us all to engage in topics without niggling over nuances of who bit whom, and who else was sucking souls from across the room. (Sorry, I’m stuck in a bombast, but I’ve got a scratch I can’t itch and my droogie is elsewhere.) What was I getting mawkish about? Oh, the vampiric commons. That is, I find the probing questions that question the validity of other’s right to participate trite and counter productive. I’m guilty of it myself. To disclose, I am anti-cult/church/institution, find the notion of PSI akin to being a bore who sucks the life out of a conversation, see gamerism as just that, and wonder at the validity of identifying with any manifestations that are post-byronic. But that’s just MY opinion; don’t mean I’m right. I’m welcome to my opinions… they’re part of what keeps me alive and bitching. I can still love the PSI and envy the beautiful lines of the byronic, just as I enjoy the conviction of the cultist and the bucolic sense of discovery of the RPGers. The revenant for me is blood. The undead is morbid animation. The vampiric is a suction of memory filtered through a bloody gauze of language, articulated in the precise deposition of crimson drops of text. I’ve defined my terms. Defamed and disgraced those I in the same breath would embrace. There’s no rancor in my soul to match the acid on my tongue. But I fain would hope that all and sundry brethren and sisters would turn back in time, rather than on each others, to explore rather than justify a fate better than death, but slightly less than “El Gordo”. Just a thought from someone more overlooked that observed. Pacé