When Frankenstein meets Abbott and Costello
he’s waiting for some major surgery.
He needs a new brain, Dracula decides,
and Lou’s brain is the pick; it’s pliable.
Lon Chaney Jr. plays the anxious Wolf Man,
who helps the boys elude, on moonless nights,  

Bela Lugosi’s campy Dracula.
Bela, who cut his teeth portraying Christ
in passion plays, had been for several years
a junky languishing in darkened rooms,
and this intensifies his creepiness.
Lenore Aubert is fetchingly undead  

and comelier than all those True Blood sluts
on HBO, those horny avatars
of soulless succubism, our new faith,
the fusion, finally, of church and state.
But all the monsters who meet Bud and Lou
seem powerless and weak, as powerless,  

in fact, as poets.  Multiplicity
is here the problem.  More is less with monsters.
Their vyings and collusions are absurd;
their frantic free-for-alls and spastic scuffles
will make them seem as unformidable
as poets. Spells cast by the Count wear off  

immediately, and only Lou is scared
and sometimes Bud.  Lon’s frightened of himself
and knows that like a poet he’ll convulse
before capitulating to the moon,
and poet-like he’ll tremble as he morphs
into a ravening monstrosity.  

The poets fidget Lon-like at their desks
and wait to monsterize themselves at readings.
Twisted, depraved, they jumble manuscripts
blinking like owls. They disarrange their hair,
then gibber into useless microphones
and crackling speakers, cursed to meet their doom,  

not crushed beneath a crumbling citadel
or immolated in a roaring blaze,
but dying more like Bud, completely broke
in Hollywood, bedridden and depressed,
sending an open letter to his fans
that begged them each to mail him fifty cents.

Originally published in Valley Voices

George Green’s book, Lord Byron’s Foot, won the New Criterion Prize, The Poet’s Prize, and an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His poems have appeared in ten anthologies. He is from Trump County, Pennsylvania, but has lived in New York City for forty years. He is obviously a proud member of the Svengoolie cult.