Listen, lover. Forget the crypts, the creaking doors,
the capes that billow like a stagehand’s cheap effect.
Our darkness is a finer thing, a vintage poured
from older casks. It’s in the intellect we’ve kept,
the taste for beauty that the hurried sun forgets.
We are the patrons of the long, deep, velvet night,
where every sense is sharpened, every silhouette
is promising, and every wrong feels so damn right.

We don’t seduce with fangs first, darling, no.
That’s for the beasts, the fledglings, the crude ghouls.
We court with conversation, soft and slow,
in firelit libraries, dismissing foolish rules.
We’ll quote Catullus in the original Latin,
trace Ovid’s tales of change upon your skin,
debate the poison in a Borgia satin,
as our cold fingers, slowly, drift within
the neckline of your blouse—not to consume,
but just to feel the machinery of life,
the metronome that taps out your doom
in such a brave, insurgent, lovely strife.
The bite’s the last kiss, not the first. The art
is in the letting of the guarded heart.

Imagine, then, my vineyard. Not of grapes,
but of the living. In my quiet halls,
the mortal guests are not in shackled shapes,
but draped in silks that answer midnight’s calls.
They laugh, they drink my wine (a ’59
that tastes of sun they’ll never see again),
their mortal heat makes all my cold stones live,
a temporary, splendid, fragrant sin.
I watch them from the balcony above,
a connoisseur of pulsing, radiant air.
I pick not out of hunger, but of love
for composition, for a certain flair—
the tenor of a laugh, a flash of wit,
the way a certain neck is keenly lit
by candle flame. I call it curation.
They call it heaven. It’s a negotiation.

And then I see you. Not the loudest one,
nor the most beautiful by standard sun.
You hold your glass of red like a dark rose,
your thoughts a private country you’ve enclosed.
You watch my guests with an anthropologist’s eye,
and when you laugh, it’s soft, and halfway shy.
A hunger wakes in me, not in the gut,
but in the mind—a deep, aesthetic rut.
I must possess the way you see the world.
I want your mortal wisdom, tightly furled,
to blossom in my everlasting gloom.
I don’t just want your blood. I want your room,
the vaulted chamber of your memory,
to walk its halls for all eternity.

So I approach. Not with a bat’s swift flight,
but with a mortal step. We talk till light
threatens the edges of the velvet sky.
Of poetry, of how all passions die,
of architecture, and of why we dream.
You tell me life feels like a narrowing stream.
I offer you the ocean of the night.
Your eyes, they hold a fascinating fright,
a prickling thrill, like standing on a spire.
You feel the danger, and you feel the fire.
You say, “They whisper things about you, Sir.”
I smile. “All good, I hope.” A teasing blur.
“They say you drink… a different kind of wine.”
I meet your gaze and let the glamour shine,
a subtle pulse of power in the air,
a softening of panic, born of care.
“I only drink,” I say, “what’s freely given.
To taste a life truly, one must be driven
by mutual consent. A stolen thrill
is empty, like a melody gone still.
But one shared willingly… ah, that’s the art,
that stops, for just a moment, my stilled heart.”

You come to me, of course. You think it’s choice.
A moth who seeks the candle’s silent voice.
Your room is in the tower, far from sound.
My gift, a single black rose, you have found.
Its scent is in your hair. I knock at three.
You open, wrapped in mortal modesty.
The fire is low. The moon is on your face.
We need no words now in this sacred space.
I kiss you first as mortals kiss, to prove
the ancient body still remembers love.
My mouth is cool, and yours is blazing sweet.
It is the past and future when they meet.
My hands, which shaped the stones of Babylon,
now trace the new-world slope of your backbone.
You tremble, not from cold, but from the sheer
expanse of time you feel is drawing near.

And then, the throat. The altar of the rite.
I breathe the scent of your alighting fright,
the salt of life that gathers on your skin.
My lips, they worship, drifting, taking in
the topography of veins, a hidden chart.
This is the moment that unstitches art.
This is the truth behind the sexy lie.
It is not just to feed. It is to die
a little death with you. To let you feel
the edge where ecstasy and terror wheel
in one fierce vortex. I am not a thief.
I am the precipice. I am the grief
for every sunset you will never miss.
I am the culminating, darkling kiss.
“Look at the moon,” I whisper, as I lower.
“Hold on to that. It gives you something… slower.”
And then I pierce. The pain is a white star,
a brief, creative, and dissolving scar.
And then… the flow. Not just of blood, but sense.
A psychic, warm, and overwhelming dense
river of you. I see your mother’s face,
the taste of childhood peaches in this place,
the sting of your first love, the book you read
that made you weep, the secret, private creed
you hold that keeps you kind. I drink it all—
the great, the small, the rise, the tragic fall.
It is the vintage of a soul, laid bare.
It is the only prayer I know. And there,
within the draught, you feel what I feel too:
The aching weight of ages passing through,
the gorgeous, crushing boredom of the wise,
the love for mortal things that flickers, dies,
and is reborn in someone new like you.
The transaction’s done. The world is made anew.

I give you of myself. A drop. A tear
of my own essence, cold and sharp and clear,
placed on your lips. A covenant. A seed.
You drink. The change is not of fang or need,
but of perception. Colours deepen, singing.
You hear the tapestry of insects winging
a mile away. You see the heat I lack
in every living thing. You feel the crack
in your own mortal limits start to heal
into something both weaker and more real.
You are not one of us. Not yet, my dove.
You are a twilight thing, made for my love,
a mortal-plus, a daytime ghost who sees
the world in doubled, stark realities.
You’ll crave the sun and fear it all the same.
You’ll learn to stoke and bank my ancient flame.

So here we are. My sexy, sad cliché.
The ancient one, the new one, gone astray.
We’ll walk the city, hand in hand, and feed
on beauty, and on what the mortals need—
a touch, a listening ear, a fleeting spark.
We’ll haunt the galleries until they’re dark,
and make our own art on each other’s skin.
The sin’s not in the taking, but the in
the staying in the moment, vast and deep,
while all the clamorous, mortal world’s asleep.
Forget the coffins. Our bed is the night itself,
a boundless, soft, and unforgiving shelf
where we inscribe our ever-growing story—
a palimpsest of transient mortal glory
over my parchment of eternal years.
I’ll drink your laughter, and I’ll drink your tears,
and you will drink from my eternal well
of time, and all the tales I have to tell.
It’s not a life. It is a long descent
into a shared, exquisite discontent.
So come, my lovely, let the last clock chime.
We have forever. And we have tonight.