PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

Like all nightmares, the dream begins in a place

just familiar enough to be recognizable,

just unfamiliar enough to be unrecognizable and,

perhaps, unheimlich, haunted.  The month is always

November, with the frail, slanted, clouded light of

that season, and the year is always nineteen eighty-one.

Teaching the course will be the great scholar,
Baron Vrdlk, the eminent historian---whose bulbous

head and incisive demeanor already torment

you, on the edge of that perspective seen only from the

corner of your eye.  He has demanded a sample of

your writing---a brief review published in the campus

newpaper during your freshman year; the style of which

he disparages with disdain.  So you offer, instead, the

poem about the Whitechapel murders---which

impresses him to consent to your admission (the

course is invitation only, instructor's discretion).  The

workload will be onerous, the reading syllabus unusually

long, and the thought processes required achingly

intense.  He is an erratically eccentric, even in exile:

he departs the campus on the weekends closest to the

New Moon, and keeps a substantial crate of Slavic soil in his

small, cramped office---in which the always staling air

surrouns the visitor or supplicant with the fetid stench of a lair.

Starward