In the surging masses of that darkened room I would every night dream a dream, though the dream was real for everyone but me. Every night I would walk the small boards of the modest drinking hall, ushering in the dark skinned and the light and creating such hellish ecstasy of movement and sound that made this seedy hole the riot it was that night. It was Le Café Noir, "The Black Café", and now I have played my finest and final performance there. Every night I would return with something new, receiving little in the way of monetary compensation for my day's efforts to composition. It was a life that held little lust, or passion, merely the daily exorcising of my own hellish soul into a small, black violin. It gave me a harsh, almost brutal clarity to see the world drained, as I was, to see The Black Café for what it really was, a sea of indistinct faces and movement. Other than that there was only darkness, and a slow trail of liquor and opiate; I was alone. But I will recount, grudgingly, with remorse and repent the times before now, when I was loved. Nevermore will I be loved, or understood, or so terribly forsaken and doomed to infatuation as I was in the late autumn of the Black Café's first year. I do not know if that hallowed institution still exists, nor do I care. The very image in my mind leaves a stinging epitaph of unrepressed misery rebuking, throbbing from my temples. A pretentious artiste talks of his muse. The fool talks to it. Only the truly damned can fall in love with it.

My gallant collaborator in sin throughout my travels to the Orient and the Jade kingdom was a man called Reagan, though we would never talk of names. His one and only name as I needed to know was Reagan. Just as he would never know my whole name and never requested it. My life was his, indebted as I was to his courage during the darkest hours of my tribal exodus in the deep jungle. He was an ever-present stabiliser to my shamelessly reckless antics, the rock between my fragile form flailing against the torrent and the endless waterfall into the abyss. He was my physical and spiritual collector, a role he had taken out of some folly on his part I'm sure. I had my part too, no doubt, convincing him to travel with me but had he wanted to he could have knocked aside my ungallant reasoning and superficial twisting of half-truths. To put a point in it, his reasons were his own, as was his name. Reagan is dead. Oh perversity! twisted horror and base dishevelled reason! that I live on in this shell which he risked everything to protect!

The night my fellows and I played our bastardised music was on fire, every element of those dank rain soaked brick houses of the bayou outskirts flickering up through the doors of The Black Café all to witness to my unholy testament. An atmosphere was built up slowly as my will formed the spectators, the participants in my blasphemous service, they who would receive my gospel, tainted by every form of exquisite sinful music I had heard on my sabbatical journeys. With one note I consecrated the congregation, blessing and forgiving the debauchery and wantonness of my night's activities, my violation of their very depths through this ever-enduring demonic sabbatical. I took no pleasure in being their master. I saw none of them, and none of them could meet and keep my stern gaze. The blur of images and unfocused night was of no consequence for me; none of the pathetic creatures in the mass would dare cry for encore, such was my presence over these unfortunates. There was my loneliness; there was my drive, my cause, and the superiority that oozed from my personage, my unsympathetic excursions into the depravities of the people I was touching but at the same time reeling from, these were what made me do this again. My life has been and gone so quickly, the moments passing from one to the other, each overwriting the previous. I had lost all human feeling, and I no longer cared for those whom I inspired it in.

They danced; Danced until their bodies glistened, until their cares, their' lives nothing but expression and shades of tone moving through the dark abyss of human instinct and the light of death, until my bow fractured the final, horrific melodic note. Not one could look up from their desire of one another; not one could turn away. It was this moment that turned my path. The crowd slowed to an unnatural euphoria and like an obscure after thought of absinthe blindness, my vision focused on Her. Her gaze, fixed on mine, her slender, pale arms swaying ever so slightly to my ethereal note… A vision of all the beauty and all the temptation of a pale Venus, but dark like Pluto, my dark, tender underworld child with eyes of such understanding and compassionate distance from the world. The wanton, pale, sensuality of a temptress, her unnaturally delicate movements sent her into closer distance, and my creation was shattered. I was a broken persona, the untouchable God of the stage taken to his knees and disintegrated by the eyes of a Prometheus. My Fire stolen! My mystique decomposed, rusted into a fragile intimacy I had no preparation for, nor could I resist of decline. And the performance stopped. There was no sentiment left. I was left floating in pleasure spiked pain. One word from that mouth, one note from that sensual voice could cut my throat, unleash all the pressure she had created in my veins and spill crimson relief upon my distanced dancers.

My rational defences pulled against their tide, forcing my consciousness upon Chronos' unfaltering tick and away from the transient blurred Elysium in which my body had forgotten myself. I anxiously dropped my note to the already applauding strangers flitting around the room at velocities I could not fathom; like twirling acrobats accelerating past the crippling want in my darkening pupils. I rushed from their spinning applause, and as I swung my head to face the room I saw in the dim recesses of the ever-darkening crypt that Angel that tore me from my skin. I felt my gut wrench, my head and neck convulse and I doubled over with a face contorted in pain, slumping through a void of abstract thought onto the floor of the black room.

The rapidly increasing awareness of what had just occurred was stabbing at my temples, my movements growing sharper and more erratically focused as I passed through the room full of lounging bodies. Each was intoxicated with reviling self-lust and a fornicator's probing inquisition and quickly out of the secluded underused entrance into the harsh chill of the outer world. Anything to remove the threat, all those revelling demons, those lustrous puppets of desire in the crowd, each one staring into my bare nakedness, ripping through the hole created by that antithesis of all sin and grace amongst them who broke me. Every ounce of my flawed oozing biological cadaver wanted to go to her and let her in, become her slave and master, sew her to me with bloody thread of passion I would muster. But my rational mind thought; battled its indelicate ape shell; it lashed out with force so potently primeval I fell to my knees at the pressure snapping inside my skull… And with flawless crisp logic it had thrown my life into discontinuity, the sea of my mind lapping fearfully at this new shore that had surfaced defiantly into the world anew. Breath steadied me, clouding on the chill of night as I crumbled against the icy black rail of the treacherous stone steps of the outside.

I externally calmed, erratically killing the memories of what I had seen, gathering again my defences and sequencing what had occurred, and only to find I was miscalculating, loosing grasp of the facts, clouding what was real and what I had imagined. A sensation somewhat like having every inch of my being pricked with minute quarks of silk surged up my spine into the recesses of my head… And without looking I knew she had come into place silently on the step behind me; that sleek, gently hand now caressed the back of my aching head.

As longing surged up from my every bone, my fearful mind was overpowered, but I still did not dare to look back, not able to risk the resurgence of that greater paralysis. As the tourniquet tightened and the vitality surged within I gasped for breath. Never so intense was torture and so perverse and exhilarating was infatuation. The minutes became hours, hours became night and I… I became bold. Whispered on by my denominated priestess I worshipped, in darkness, talked down from my solitude by one so sweet and so satanically fervent I cared not for cold nor time as the autumn night fell into feeling. This was not ecstasy; it was transcendence, bereft of all mortal plagues of time or purpose or physicality of being. As I collapsed in exhaustion a tear thought through my blindness. All setting drifted away, and I drifted into the chaotic dreams of the lover, the musician and the eternally damned.

In a heartbeat she had gone. My undernourished body revolted in unworldly spasm, shaking, convulsing clouds of wispy vapour in torrents of into the chill November sky. My last memories were of the ice. The alley closed in and the ice formed on my unfaltering catatonia. I would slip away, dipped in a pool of freedom and forever immersed in skies of radiant exploration

Reagan had found my dishevelled cadaver, so I was told, huddled on the step, crystals of bitter frost on my nose and fingers. He commented on the harsh winter that we were sure to be entering that autumn could bring such a bite. I had been feverish in bed through the whole day. I remember nothing of the dreams, those hellish extremities I dwelled in all day. I was dejected, my mind and body remaining at constant odds, my fever dreams at all times caressing the edge of my field of vision. Blood forced it's way into limbs that would not move, and on the sundown of that second day I had yet to speak on utterance of thanks, explanation, or even congenial politeness to Reagan or any other than a shattered mirror. I resented reflection, as I hated Reagan for saving my life. His elusive friendship had caused nothing but stabbing pain in the very heart of my skull. Lady Death had given me my escape in to conjunctive dissolution and his dark, unkempt face was all that stood in the way. I began a silent front of hatred against my only friend. A vigil of rejected internal vultures, pecking his face off with my mind… I could see nothing else.

But the sun was down. Vigour, unstoppable passion filled me throughout, I would play and play my final encore, and I would beat the corrosive rhythm out of each pathetic moving ape on that floor and win my dark mistress. She would return and would love me as I loved her, desire my control, will her shadow of cold half-life away for me; die for me. I would preach to the mass and elate them like dogs into mansions, but my last sermon was not to the choir, it was to the church.

I saw none of the others; I went on stage, without music, without strategy. Silence.

And then began our ultimate end. This time I could see crisply every face, every sleek sensual angle of the bodies there, and each crisp blue ghost on my slow boat to hell was lifted in my painfully sound. The violin struck notes none of these slaves and paupers were capable of resisting, and like rats from the flooded cellar they ran from the sides of room, a veritable struggle to be near me. Their God could save their soul but for this last time I was probing that vessel, pleasuring it and forcing their bodies into such lurid contortions that there very bones were mine to bend as I chose. There were no victors, only wounded, no dancers, only me.

Through the sound She came to me, walked in a void through the crowd, to me, reading my every note before I played, always a stare, and I continued for her until it seemed my honed and battered fingers would break at the speed and fluidity of my devastating swipes. The look she gave me ended my thought, my mind. All was lost to the night and the Black Café, music began and ended and I no longer cared. I could have stayed in that place forever, and the last ounce of my life was spent on that stage, to rest forever in all to tread those hallowed boards, bigger than I and any other on them. I had had my share of the Sun's glare, and was now simply a mirror for it.

She came to me for the last time in the alley, at her design and her purpose. The whispering intoxicated me, melting my concepts of distance and duration. She would whisper so much, and so silently I vexed my face in concentration just as to hear every syllable as purely crystal as my feeble shell. They made my thumbs experience a sharp pricking sensation, my eyelids flutter and I was hers.

"Kill Him"

No twisting and turning to escape this insanity, no rejection, no spirit of this world or the next and not the slightest moral quibble of a rational mind or conscience could force itself between my vacant stair and the desire of Lady Death. As Reagan lay at his straw mattress I drew my thinnest violin string around his pulsating jugular, and the sound I coaxed from his bloody mouth, that gargling orifice of saliva and scratched pleading, was the last note I heard. Shame is not a word that can describe my feelings at the sight of Reagan's blood spilling from his mouth onto my hands. I rushed to my Lady. I found her bleeding from the mouth in the puddle of the alley, a thin violin string glazing her pale, beautiful neck. My body fell limp against the wall of the tall steps. I wept. I was found with frost forming on my nose and blood stained fingers, barely breathing, babbling softly of whispers as the ignorant pigs dragged me into their forsaken hole. I babbled of nothing. I talked of dreams. She had given me her every item. I gave my all to my love, I gave others and she returned in kind. For what gifts has Death to give mortals? Loss, pain, torments beyond all Biblical hells perhaps? No pompous, righteous cautionary tale this, but it ends in a cautionary melody. Do not court Death; She is her own, only, and most passionate lover; the Lady will love no other.

Smoking

This one was odd, I don't pretend it's more than average, same as I don't pretend the previous was more than average but it was written a while ago...