the poet as nosferatu

It's the blasted horse latitudes, that sense of drifting, without a wind to go with or tack against. Always a little frustrating.

Usually, in the aftermath of a tour, or even a single reading, it is problematic. I usually plan a daisy chain of events to avoid this sense of awkwardness, this sense of drift. If I am the sort of person who overcommits, it is because I, like nature, abhor a vacuum. There has to be flow, into or out of me. Boredom has always been a problem for me (I was fine, for a time, in Mississippi, until I became a simulacrum for others, with no sense of self, playing a role where I was actually proxy for others. It was not a fun existence, I welcomed the validation of an escape, despite my personal losses).

Morgantown has my family and a lot of personal connections, but the limited spectrum here, expecially during the summer, is disturbing. To someone used to this pace, waiting a week or two for a "major event" is fine. To someone used to major events on the hour, it is numbingly slow. Eventually, one runs out of output and requires input.

You can only love for so long before you need to hear "I love you" once again. I am not God, my well of patience and charitable love extends only as deep as my core, which is not infinite. As my old friend Dave used to say: "Everybody does what they do for a payoff". Eventually, the sense of nobility, even superiority, lent by being the romantic wears thin. The emotional batteries drain.

Deep down, all creative artists are nosferatu, the undead, we feed on the life around us to find the energy to rise from our crypts and walk amongst mortals. That I have chosen not to indisciminately feed, as I did in Los Angles right after my first divorce, taking every offered neck, is a good thing, but eventually the hunger gets to you and you must chose to be like the David Bowie character in "The Hunger" and be trapped forever hungering in a shell that has lost the ability to seek sustenance, or surrender to the hunger and feed like Lestat, uncaring of the moral consequences of the predation. I have always sought the middle road, where a healthy and synergistic relationship both feeds and is fed by me, and perhaps it is, in the words of my poem "glass roses" out there...but the night grows long and the hunger grows deep.

Sooner or later, I feed or wither.

the nosferatu's quandry

The night grows long, the hunger deep,
I can feel it in me, as I sleep,
a hollow womb of poisoned thought
that floods with passions scattershot.
That I might rise to walk the trail
where lovers strive and lovers fail
will not be left to destiny,
castoff, aloft, to plummet free
and gather speed and gather seed
and, in the end, to gather need
to blight the night with crippling pain
until I dare to feed again.


William F. DeVault. all rights reserved.