A Blood Myth for our Time: ‘The Chancellor’ by Phil McNulty

A Vampire Poem

We are on the cusp of spring tides.
Clouds rattle above chimneys,
Fog and mist scream silence.
Through the door, ajar, we glimpse the Chancellor
As man, made beast.
A thing of the night, regal in his curling sneer.
A flawless complexion, pale lips, perfect diction.
We are seduced by silk shirts and hand made suits.
His slender hands are made for caressing red drinks in bulbous glasses,
But our blood is the object of this joyless libertine,
Taking time, from his boutique life, to hunt us down,
Turn back our clocks

We are enthralled.

He has mere flickering sense of our reality.
Undead behind drapes, in his twitching twilight life,
He fears the truth, in searing shafts of exposure
That burn like hell.
He prefers moonlit rain, ranting in torrents,
The ambiguity of the night,
Promises at dusk forgotten by the dawn.
The distraction of dense pecuniary deceit,
A big idea, the good war
Which girds the gullible
And where blood runs to puddles
Which cannot reflect his passing.

He favours littered, windswept streets,
Neglected burial grounds, abandoned mills
The colliery’s empty, cathedral, caverns.
Seeking the nurse on night shift,
Bedsit student, bus driver,
Postmistress, teacher or taxi man.
On a dark day, all offer their throats
To he that would take their crops,
Close their shops, cull their cattle,
Kill their trade and make them beggars in their own land.

It is for their own good.

This predator enjoys his requiem of gluttony
With us, his coven spiders, a personal blood bank
He bites us to give us life. We give him thanks
In trust that, at full moon, he will save us from the wolf,
Fight his friends to expunge our deficit
And be benign over the debauchery of our debt.

We pray for ugly daughters that they may live in peace
And turn our faces to deceive
When he spits the ugly gristle
And detritus of our neighbours
As they die in the fields, that he should thrive,
While we take our medicine in bargain beers.

We commoners ignore his slight, white, fangs
His cataract eyes, sharp suits, needle-track thighs,
His trick of twirling cape and cane.
His rabid, bat-bitten, shape shifting.
For our modern, inebriate, vampire
Is hidden in half sight, with a respectable life
Where coffins and Transylvanian soil are passé.
This beast is cravatted and clubbable
And stalks our land with other beasts and revenants.

But we have our choices.
To take up our stakes and silver bullets and garlic
And fight back against the apocalypse
So that, in later years,
We may face grandchildren’s questions with pride.
Grandad, Grandma, what did you really do during the plague?
Or, we can fall on our knees in superstition
Believing that these monsters, truly,
Have the alchemy, have discovered the Grail
And have tasted rainwater from the footprint of the Gods.