1517
the age of reformation and sickness and death the age where spirits caused fevers and fevers caused widows
1517
a bad year to be a man without a name to be the father of seven without ever siring a child made ‘pa’ by the death of his own, by the need of his mother.
1517
a bad year to be bound with a family to your back and an upheaval at your door
1517
the year jonathan moran brother of seven son of a dead man was sent to join his father in the ground.
seems if you die in the right place at the wrong time you don’t get the release you’re promised.
there’s no judgement, no hell fire. no heaven.
there’s a burning, a heave in your chest that makes you feel as if maybe the devil really is trying to claw his way out of your skin.
then there’s days, endless days. days that see you starve as you fight it days that see you dance with madness, days that see it spin you round and round and round again a cruel waltz.Â
it’s 1518 when the steps stop and the music he couldn’t hear finally fades.
1518Â
when he drinks when his skin stands back up from his bones and he’s more man that skeleton again
1518Â
when he realizes the cure of his hurt was in his making drink the way you were drunk from wrist slashed cold lips you can’t see through the fever suckling your pulse do that and you’ll feel like a person even as your humanity dies.
1754
a good year to follow the words he’d been hearing whispered to get out of town while town’ll let him. a good year to chase after the myths and set up keep in the foothills the carpathians.
1754
a good year to stay in the shadows there the ones thick as honey and twice as dark besides. a good year to lick the wounds his too long life has wrought.Â
it’s not until 1766 that those cold pools yield and show him that this madness and madness it is is catching, and not of his mind.
1880
the year his fellows from the east the peers that named him vampire - that kissed his mind back to sanity that gave him his wife his son - take leave of their home.
1880
the year he and his are forced to go to take up root to the west to settle in berlin
1915
the year he learns that it’s not just a stake that’ll kill a vampire fire’ll do it and do it well.
and do it it did, leaving his life in ash. his wife, his son. burnt before his eyes, scattered to the wind even as he clung to their grey bones.Â
live long enough and you’ll see the world take to the breeze.
1916-1925Â
dark years
things he’s put from his mind
swallowed down like the bile they are.
1926
america the promise land brought up to its shores like a bilge rat half starved and more than half mangy.Â
the golden land fed him bathed him in blood fresh and pumping vearile on the promise of promise
it’s this blood that has held him tucked tight to a beatless breast for a century.