Excerpt from "The Complete 'Dark Shadows' (of My Childhood)"
I understand, Maggie—I, too, expected
Barnabas would break into my bedroom
in the middle of the night. My jugular
was yours in close-up, moist bite marks
throbbing double-time. “That room
the nurse had left open just a crack,”
the doctor says, pointing at the window
where Maggie disappeared, “was wide open.”
Poor Willie, everyone’s sadomasochistic
toy, beaten by Barnabas with his serpent-
head cane and, now, slapped bloody
by Jason who claims, “I’m prepared
to go all the way, my boy.”
David (Trinidad, not Little David, the psychic
child) sent an Amazon link this morning
for Dark Shadows: The Complete Original Series,
1,225 episodes (I will compose one sentence
for each), priced $539.99—he’s written
three hundred Peyton Place haiku over three years,
understands I’ll find a way to afford it—
and I noticed a customer review anticipating
a “soon-to-be-released” Dark Shadows film
starring Johnny Depp (who would require
several coats of Barnabas’s eye shadow just
to resemble a vampire); I worried all day
the film could rob my poem of relevance,
as if I’m writing star-fuck verse instead
of excavating childhood night terrors,
though I really tried to feel gratitude
for Depp: after all, as David reminded me,
Dark Shadows: The Complete Original Series
exists only because of the new movie,
as a promo vehicle—in a coffin-shaped
DVD box I want, badly, to own, even if
the medium is obsolete by the time I write
this poem’s 1,225th and final sentence—
and after preordering the complete series
tonight, I witnessed the most terrifying
episode thus far: down went the coffin lid
on screaming Maggie, the scene shot
first-person POV, an utterly psychotic way
for director Lela Swift to tell this story
(what compelled Swift, who also
directed the first and last episodes
of Dark Shadows, to decide that all of us
watching on 6/7/67, especially my mother
and me, her toddler son, should feel
as if Barnabas just buried us alive?).
There’s something about that room
in the basement: keeping it under
lock and key for eighteen years is bound
to invite a certain amount of curiosity—
especially for those of us who can’t shake
the image from our heads of Maggie
buried alive for a night in the Collins tomb.
It’s taken forty episodes to hear the echo
of my mother’s name, Margaret, in Maggie,
who sits at the Victorian gothic mirror
in her bedroom prison, locked inside
by Barnabas, and tries fitfully to remember
who she is—“Maggie, yes, Maggie, that’s
your name,” she says, “that’s my name,
I must remember that, Maggie for Margaret,
I am Maggie Evans”—the night after I dream
my mother, Margaret, now ten years dead,
appeared in the kitchen of an abandoned
house where I squatted in Chicago’s
Logan Square neighborhood, wanted
to hear about my new writing projects
as I made her a grilled cheese sandwich;
and if she were alive tonight, I’d ask:
back in 1967, when we watched this episode
together (ten days before my first birthday),
was she angry like I am now, in my living room,
that Maggie opened her shameless music box
once more and inflicted its merry-go-round
melody on us, over and over and over.
