one piece from the 2010 Poe Show

[shadowprison]

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Neil posted a bootleg video of one of the pieces that I performed at this year's 9th Annual Poe Show.

I will also paste the text, under the cut.



Edgar Allan Poe liked teenage girls. Edgar Allan Poe
loved teenage girls- enough to marry one of them
so Edgar Allan Poe knew teenage girls.
But if he himself was a teenage girl
he would still be drawn to shadows.
He would be a sullen Lolita who would rather
hang out at the morgue than the mall
prefer macabre to maybeline.
He would dye his hair raven-black
paint his fingernails black-cat black
dress in varying shades of black.

He would be the strange and unusual goth girlfriend
you were afraid to break up with in high school
renting Japanese horror films and listening to nothing
but Bauhaus, while cutting himself.
He would try to photograph ghosts and his whole life
would be a dark room
one big
dark
room.
He would be utterly alone and celebrate Halloween
all year long. He would like monsters and werewolves
he might even love werewolves
but he would certainly be
on Team Edward.

Edgar Allan Poe would surely side with vampires
who despise sunlight for making them sparkle
like golden scarabs
whose souls are eternally damned.

He would identify with beings forced to endure
indefinite periods of isolation and value
a vampire’s willingness to happily wear
the masque of the red death
during special cycles of the moon.

He would appreciate the absence
of a beating heart that might otherwise
drive him to tell-tale insanity.
He would cherish the fragrance of blood
and become nauseous at the smell of wet-dog.

And Poe would realize that
for centuries-old Nabokovian vampires
every girl is underage.