This is Plahm’s most dramatic costume change. By donning Dracula’s cape, he gains access to a register the catalog has been circling but never fully entered: the Gothic sublime, where love and hunger are indistinguishable and desire is literally vampiric. The opening stanza establishes the paradox that drives the entire piece—”forever forgotten / but remembered”—which is both Dracula’s condition (immortal yet erased from daylight society) and Plahm’s own Muse dynamic (endlessly devoted yet unrequited). The vocabulary deliberately trades the catalog’s domestic warmth for intoxicating excess: “claret,” “forbidden tide,” “primordial,” “ethereal,” “crimson.” This is the Honeybee Bard borrowing from Bram Stoker, and the borrowing is knowing. The “essence of claret” is the poem’s most layered image—claret as wine, as blood, as the deep red of desire—and the wish to “drown / in your perfume’s / forbidden tide” pushes the Muse relationship into a sensory overwhelm that his gentler poems only gesture toward. The invention of Gustavién/Draculina is a bold move: she is simultaneously the Muse recast as vampire queen, a romantic partner worthy of an eternal creature, and a figure who can match the speaker’s intensity with her own “undying bite.” The “alternate back page” section performs a crucial tonal shift—from romantic Dracula to predatory Dracula—and the absinthe image (“limpid, bittersweet and intoxicating”) is the poem’s most accomplished sensory moment. The final three words—”Lust, love, and blood”—function as a trinity that is both the poem’s table of contents and its confession. The closing plea for reciprocity strips the Gothic costume away: beneath the cape, the fangs, the moonless midnight wind, stands the same man who has asked for love in every poem he has written. Dracula is just another mask for Dave.

The most theatrically ambitious poem in Plahm’s catalog, and one that justifies its costume through the depth of its parallel structure: everything true of Dracula is true of the Honeybee Bard, and the Gothic register allows him to say things the domestic voice cannot. The equation of thirst with longing, blood with intimacy, immortality with unrequited persistence—these are not decorative metaphors but structural isomorphisms that give the poem genuine intellectual weight beneath its operatic surface. The vocabulary is lush and committed: “claret,” “primordial,” “ethereal,” “crimson,” “absinthe”—Plahm fully inhabits the Gothic register without winking at the audience, which is the only way persona poetry works. The invention of Gustavién is the poem’s most creative stroke, providing the speaker with a named beloved who exists within the mythology rather than being imported from outside it. The “alternate back page” section is a smart structural choice, offering a darker, more predatory version of the same desire—the cape unfurled, the prey named, the hunger made explicit—which prevents the poem from sentimentalizing its monster. The absinthe passage is the poem’s finest writing: sensory, specific, and deeply unsettling in its conflation of intoxication with consumption. The closing demand for “reciprocity” is devastating in context—after all the Gothic grandeur, the vampire’s need reduces to the same simple human plea that runs through the entire catalog. Where the poem occasionally falters is in the accumulation of adjectives (“soft, warm, inviting,” “limpid, bittersweet and intoxicating”) which can tip from atmospheric into overwritten, and some middle stanzas rely on Gothic convention (the crypt, the abyss, the inferno) without refreshing the imagery. But the overall conception is bold, the execution is committed, and the poem adds an essential dark thread to the tapestry—a reminder that the Honeybee Bard has fangs as well as a stinger.