MR. DRACULA


Mr. Dracula runs this town with fang and fist.
He bleeds us dry and lays our dreams to waste.
When choosing his victims, he tends to be democratic:
He doesn’t suck only on those who sleep in an attic,
The idiotic or the otherwise pathetic.
Mr. Dracula drained my father down to his last
Drop, then came to turn my flesh to paste.
But I alone have escaped through this dreary mist,
Your screaming Cassandra, bleeding my prophetic
Warning to you, which I can’t make too emphatic.

Mr. Dracula’s thirst won’t be quenched until he’s kissed
Every girl and boy in this town and made a feast
Of their dreams and their blood, in his melodramatic,
Satanic lust for empire. And any critic
Who stands in his way can expect no sympathetic
Ear, for all have had their blood replaced
With his poison. Mr. Dracula has passed
His lies on to his victims as though he’d pissed
In their veins and brains and made them idiotic
With Draculaism --each victim his fanatic.

His fangs are more sharper than those of that
serpent who hissed
Its way and will through Eden and taught us to taste
The knowledge of our disease whose only tonic
Is either death or else daring to become analytic.
In his cape, he might be mistaken for a peripatetic,
But underneath, lies the heart of a fiend beating fast
Toward undermining our dreams, slicker
than can be guessed.
For Mr. Dracula’s thirst has caused him to twist
Even our tongues and brains from their empathetic
Health into cancerous meat, sad, manic.


Mr. Dracula’s our father, our mother, our Zeitgeist,
Our demon lover, sucking us into a tryst,
Sure to drive us each batty and to make thick
Our sacred blood — yours, mine — and to hasten black
Poverty, failure, loss, this burning lake,
This hell, this jam-packed planet, this heist,
This town with its mill for which we are the grist.
And don’t let’s leave out our children, whose blissed
Innocence ends in bleak damnations which leak
Their blood and their dreams into his fangs, sad, sick.

Mr. Dracula runs this town and he keeps a list
Of naughty boys and girls who’d become their own Christ.
So, take my advice and avoid any lunatic
Who tells you otherwise. The mentally weak
Are bound to go on ignoring my little critique.
But you... you whose wisdom has not been erased
By Mr. Dracula’s fangs, you can outwit that beast,
If only you’ll let my words take you by the wrist
To subvert his evil will. Wear this garlic. Don’t panic.
And let the stake you drive at your crossroads be politic.


Words and Music by Galen Green c 1989