Waxing Poe-tic



                                                                               Waxing Poe-tic


   I enrolled at Mr. Jefferson's University with a dream to write. It mattered little to me what words were written, or upon what subject they spoke, only that I wrote it well, and that it was well-received. To write was the dream that carried me to this place, and to write was the dream that carried me to this room, “his” room, Room Number 13 on the West Range, that part of the Western Range traditionally known as “Rowdy Row.” Once I discovered that “he” had lived in this very room as a first year student, then I knew that I must have it, so I finagled my way in. What I did not know as I did so however, what I could not know, was that he lived here yet, or that at least some part of him did. 

I was pleased when my devious work paid off, when the assignment of the room was granted to me. It had only been ten years since his untimely 1847 demise, but his fame was such that, in his honor, some admiring student had already decorated the room with an iron raven. The raven stood steeped in black upon the bedside table, draped in melancholy, its head turned back as though in search of the shadow that the window must throw when the sun shone through it just right. The raven statue was the perfect adornment for the space. I often sat looking at it in admiration, my mind filled with “his” wondrous tales when it would have been better served to concentrate on its studies.
   
Schooling was never easy for me. I was neither the best student, nor the most popular. I was cursed with a mind that was easily distracted. To fall in with the bad lot was predictable, as they are generally the first to befriend the weak, and the wayward. Drunk I spent most nights, my yawp loud on “Rowdy Row”, unwittingly adding my piece to its legacy. I was a "First Year" student, and ranked near the bottom of my class. There was time yet to kick in the work, but for now there was a movement afoot. The pubs were alive with talk of rebellion and succession. Mine was a simple mind that would add its youthful passions to the mix. 
   
It was on one such boisterous night, when the debates ran loud and the tempers long, that “he” visited that room in which I resided, the same room that had once belonged to him. The erudite crowd in the taproom I frequented had thinned considerably when I made ready to leave with, as was usual for me, a bottle of chilled ale hidden inside my jacket. On this particular night a storm blew from the north and east, a storm both angry and cold, a storm easily ignored through the bottles of wine, and through the philosophical quarrels of the tavern, but a storm which now begged my attention. I raced its winds toward my room, bumbling hard through the dreary night with my youthful mind a-fogged. As you would expect from someone in such a condition I lost the race. I arrived at my room, soaked, frozen, and sauced. Stripped of sopping clothes I laid myself across the bed, my back hard against the wall, the pilfered pilsner in one hand and an unlit candle in the other. By way of the casements the gaslights from the yard-walk illuminated the room, shining through glass opaqued with pattering droplets and awash in watery waves. The occasional lightening blast crackled across the roof-top before giving way to violent thunderclaps which shook the very air, sparking a frightened prayer from lips tasting like devilish piss, lips that were seldom quick to implore His assistance. But with all of that, with all of the turmoil outside, inside the room was soft, if not safe. The gaslight filtering through the watery window made delicate, drifting shadows upon the walls, creating strange effects highlighted by tremendous bursts of spectral light whispering a low, demonic hiss beneath the sulfurous hammer blows of Thor and Odin. 
   
It was neither the night for a sailor’s wife, nor for a student far from home.
  
The bottle of ale was half empty when I found myself staring. My eyes had strayed above the door, upon the wall, where the shadow of the statue crawled! The raven’s shadow, flitted by the light and the water was alive for the moment, its head bobbing, dancing a raven’s dance. I could not help but wonder, “Was this the start of it all? Was it here in this room that the idea bloomed, on just such a tempestuous night?” 

It was then I knew fear, for it was then he came near, ominous, black, his tell-tale heart beating from out the storm...  
   
Tossed on the night’s plutonium shore
As Seraphim tip-toed the tufted floor,
Caught in the raven-shade’s web of lore
I heard his rap-tap-tap on my door.
   
Young, intoxicated, cold, alone, afraid, naked and shivering, I opened that door. 
I let him come inside, where his spirit now resides... evermore.

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