Sebastian Horsley : THE VAMPIRE AT HIS OWN VEINS

Ennui woke me and with a yawn I swallowed the dawn. From the abyss of sleep to the abyss of life. From nightmares to daymares.

I rise and paint myself a face. Like the flowers one lays on graves so I lay on my life. I am the wound and the knife. I am the shadow and the strife.

I descend into the city. My hunger is an insatiable vampire coveting this great city as its feeding place. The twisting, swarming streets of Soho, snaking their way like arteries and veins through a body are where I feed The Great Need.

Like a suicide I shall open these veins to freedom. I love you horrible life. I love you horrible city; your bloody fingers point to heaven. Everything you have rejected, everything you have lost, everything you have scorned and broken I shall covet and collect.

I shall extract beauty from evil and evil from beauty. To show that virtue and sin exist in everything. For in Soho every human flaw, from a single wound to the corrupt heart has been sealed in the amber of artifice. From the glitter to the litter. From the whore to the poor; the harlots and the hunted have pleasures of their own to give, the vulgar herd can never understand. I shall wander across the moving shadows of this great city in search of pity.

The anonymous energy of this great city sweeps people apart, violating love and permanent relationships. And what is love but a crime? A crime which needs an accomplice. An accomplice who can be shared, and bought and sold.

I opened the door and stood before the poor stark flesh upon the bed. The room was malevolent. Clad with a cold and sinister beauty. The bed, stripped of sheets and covers, the striped mattress as naked as a corpse. The room is like a morgue in which love is laid out.

There are some women who inspire you with the desire to conquer them and to take your pleasure of them; but this one fills me only with the desire to die slowly beneath her gaze. Full of brilliant and violent colour; blinking her useless eyelids at nothingness. Her voice was the death rattle of a woman who had been forgotten by the world. She gave me her skeletal kiss and I could smell the graveyard stench of her breath.

I had come to commit a crime. And I wanted her to save me. Save me like a tourniquet. And like the rising dead she struggled upwards and I wanted her to bleed in her struggles. To hear her moans as the red flesh was tattered away from the white bones. But I fell motionless, and a great silence, a monstrous silence came upon me. I heard her voice echoing down the centuries. I saw her eyes drowning with lies. And I felt like an insect. I was dying though my body still clung to me.

I fucked her; gulfs of silence between each stroke. I laid her open like a girl. And she opened vaster and vaster every second, an incredible wound of nothingness, into which I was falling. And then through the thick swathings of darkness, first the dull slaps of flesh on flesh and then hatred like a flash of lightning that broke through the gloom and glittered.

I enfolded myself in the cloak of evil and put my fate into Satan’s hands. I was seized with the poetry of cruelty as we came together in our hideous coupling, flailing our eight limbs like some giant suppurating insect. Blood mingles with sperm and sperm with blood. She stared skywards like a dead woman on a battlefield trying to guard in herself her own particular wound. But to no avail. Her savage eyes betrayed the scene of carnage. And the more she resisted the more I insisted. With my crown of birds of prey I had come here to make her bleed for me and bleed for me she would. Oceans and oceans until with a graveyard howl she cried “No more!”

And then it was my turn. I knelt as if to pray and let this carrion crow lacerate my flesh; I wanted her to destroy me and as she flogged me she made my existence into something exceptional, hideous, poetic. My wounds blossomed like flowers.

I looked at her; corpse yellow - a heap of entrails. Oh my little lover how I hate you. Cover up your ugly udders with sad rags.

Once left, she torments and follows me. I walk through the veins, down which flows all the filth and horror, fear, hate, disease and death of human history. The woeful roads that stretch towards the sad, dark heart of the city. The city in its dusks and dawns that change more quickly than the human heart.

I hate you horrible life. I hate you horrible city.

The sun sinks in its own blood. I looked at my watch. It was 5.00pm. Rush hour. I snaked my way home and shot up in my room. Why am I so beautiful but so obsessed with doom?

The careless, not to say impatient way in which I bear the burden of life does leave a vague hope in me that I might loose or cast it away at any moment. But it is not to be. I overdose and wake up five hours later with the needle still in my arm. I stand firm in my refusal to remain conscious during a crisis. I cannot die. I am dead already.

Comments

sebastian darling...i've lost my phone with all my numbers on it in san tropez last week,and i'm beside myself in paris until i get back to london.i'll come straight to the point,i'm pregnant and it's most certainly your doing.i've thought long and hard.everyone tells me to do the neat and tidy thing,but i simply can't.i thought i'd be able to be detached if this scenario ever arose,but what i feel is so absolute.sebastian darling,you're going to be a father.i know you'll hate this,but the sooner you get your head around things the better for everybody .

i've a meeting at browns hotel in albermarle street next wednesday .i'll come by afterwards so we can talk.
please dont be angry or frightened.
your book is going to be success and i've still got some money from last years work,so the child should be okay.

always
with love [and trepidation]

saskia

Posted by: saskia loog-robinson | August 14, 2007 at 12:16 AM