Tag Archives: gothic

♣You Again ♣

 

A face in the chamber –  I couldn’t connect it

Like Dante’s Beatrice, beatific in black

Loquacious you weren’t.  But I’ve come to expect it

How lovely to see you – it threw me off track.

As the summer deceases and winter approaches

Let casting of shadows be gone from your art.

Lighten up, dark enchantress. Your coldness reproaches.

Oh pull out the dagger you’ve stuck in my heart!

Will another bad sonnet, addressed to your highness

Suffice to start thawing the frost in your soul?

Ennobling it isn’t – this taciturn shyness…

Vampire girl – be a sociable witch;

Even necrophiles hope for a smile, or a twitch.

Never fear. Not your corpse, just your friendship’s my goal.

♥ V.D. 1999 ♥

 

Horror of horrors!   Dark lady,  it’s you again

Abbess of shadow and sinister sprite.

Pray show me, sweet Nelida, how to express myself:

Passion?   Pure malice?    Or murder by fright…

You opened the dungeons where dreams slept desireless

Vanquished my sleep of misogynist night.

A sepulchral shudder enlivens my being:

Liquescent infernoes of Gothic delight.

Elevation celestial or depths of despair –

No middle to stand on beholding your visage

The firmament drops as I swing in the air.

In this fall, or this orbit, show mercy, bright maiden

Nor quench solar fires with lunar disdain.

Eclipsing at zenith, you blacken my brain.

 lava-flow

† ideal N †

 

 

Name: Nelida   Gender: female   Nationality: unknown
Meaning derived from Eleanor (shining light)
Continent/Origin: Andean sources of the Amazon

 

Thy name, somber lady, illuminates heaven

As dazzling light penetrates into shadow.

Enlaid in rare colors (oh Lord, what a lead-in),

Your blackness out-veils the proverbial widow.

Iron maidens get nailed.  Don’t rest in denial

and lie to your soul that your actually dealin’.

I only ask this to your face:  that you’ll smile

Unlocking your Gothic cathedrals to kneel in.

No death-dirges here.  I’m no spike-studded user

Eventually yours to pursue until captured.

Let’s hope there is time – but we risk being raptured.

I’m not into pain;  not a sado-abuser.

Don’t masochists also need fun in the sun?

All I want is a friend.    So I hope you’re the one…

Idol-of-Perversity

Recueillement

Christian brothers and sisters may question me for including one of the “Flowers of Evil” (Recueillement) among my offerings here – but we must remember that Christ was a man of sorrows. It’s all in how you see it. After all, one can read the Gospels as the ultimate Gothic tragedy which turns into eternal triumph [think of all those funereal cypresses, night meetings in whitewashed alleys, tombs, enclosed gardens, stinking corpses arising from the grave and  sobbing veiled women  next to bloody pain-wracked bodies expiring under a black sky].

I personally associate the  “long linceul traînant à l’Orient”  [The long shroud trailing toward the East] not only with encroaching Night (which I think the poet intended) but also with the shroud  of  shrouds.

The  illustration on the poem page is by American artist W.D. Heath and was done in 1900 for an Edition of poems by Edgar Allan Poe. The title The Night’s Plutonian Shore is from a line in Poe’s The Raven

If you think this poem is a death-trip, try reading Psalm 88!