Waxing Poe-etic

I enrolled in the 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 here, and to write well was the dream that brought me to this room, “his” room, No. 13 on the West Range, that part of the Western Range traditionally known as “Rowdy Row.” Once it was discovered that “he” had lived in this very room as a first year student, then I knew that I must have it also. It was with much effort that I finagled my way in, but what I did not know, what I could not know, was that he lived here yet, or that at least some small part of him did.

I was so very pleased when my devious work paid off, and the assignment of the room was granted to me. It had only been ten years since “his” 1847 death, 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, it’s posture draped in melancholy, its head turned back as though in search of the shadow that the window must throw when the moon struck it just so. The raven statue was the perfect adornment for the space, except that I often found myself staring at it in admiration, my mind filled with wonderous tales when it should have instead been focused on the opened textbook in my hands.

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, so 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” as I unwittingly added my piece to its legacy. I was a First Year near the bottom of my class. There was plenty of time yet to kick in the work, but for now there was a movement afoot, and the pubs were alive with talk of rebellion. 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 me in his old haunt. The taproom had thinned considerably when I made ready to leave with, as was usual, a bottle of chilled ale hidden inside my jacket. On this particular night a storm blew from the North and East, a storm angry and cold, a storm easily ignored through the wine glasses and the philosophical quarrels of the tavern, but a storm which now begged my attention. I raced its winds to my room, bumbling hard through the dreary night with my youthful mind a-fog. 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, an unlit candle in the other. By way of the casements the gaslights from the yard-walk shone through the room, through glass opaqued with pattering droplets and awash in watery waves. The occaisional lightening blast crackled across the roof-top before giving way to violent thunderclaps which shook the very air, and sparked a freightened prayer from lips tasting of devil-ish piss, lips that were seldom quick to implore God’s 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 that whispered a low, demonic hiss beneath the sulferous hammer blows of Thor and Odin.

It was not the night for a sailor’s wife, nor for a student far from home.

The ale was half empty when I found myself staring. My eyes 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, alive for the moment, 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 tempestual 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 up in the raven-shade’s web of lore

I heard his rap-a-tap-tap on my door.

Young, drunk, cold, alone, afraid, naked, shivering, I opened that door.

I let him inside, where his spirit resides...

evermore.