January 1, 1873. Prague
Awake in an intensely cold dark room
I remember who I am
Warm summery dream of the child gone
The damp is contagious and is attacking me
My guts in disagreement with themselves
As if I could vomit out my heart
And my bones and muscles contracted in a rictus of numb agony
My hands and feet of whitest ice
The nails like filthy hooks
My odour fills the room as a dismal stain might, creeping and corrupting
In the mirror the reflection so repugnant I never look
I stagger to the window and push out the wooden shutters
The city is still dark and smouldering
Here and there a candle flares against a pane
The sun does not want to rise today
In a century of wars and a week of murders
Europe killing itself and screaming in my ears
It amuses to remember myself as I was
I actually smile at the absurd memory of it all
A handsome young boy whose father was a lord
Mother so long now dead but her beauty stays with me
Such a pale face against such dark hair
Her crucifixes and Macedonian accent and her myrrh
It makes me laugh to think I had a mother
It’s snowing
The loveliness of the flakes would make me cry
But now I have no tears for anything at all
I gaze down on this city and I feel nothing but hunger
Unending unendurable hunger and a thirst I can never slake
Some pale awful sun threatens to break through a cloud
I pull the curtains and retire back to shadow
I curl up in my deep anxiety and I dream horrible dreams
June 12, 1888. London
I feed and I hide and I hide and I feed
I have paid off the man who owns this hotel
He must obviously know who I am
He must obviously know what I am
A room in an attic I gaze out at dirty London
In Islington where I cruise camouflaged by the smoke
And Shoreditch where I stand under trees by an old mortuary
Almost unseen in the fogs and the wavering lights
In my cloak of burnt soot black
In my shirt of fetid silk
In my boots that fill my feet with nails
Yes there was a girl tonight like a girl from another night
A girl from the olden days who had lived in a different world
It angered me so that she wouldn’t remember me
Yes she must have loved me once
But now in this form I am unrecognisable
Yes of course I must understand this
Still her gracefulness burns at my eyes
The sweet smell of her rushes into my nose and it’s acrid
She fills me with hunger she fills me with thirst
I follow her patiently as she steps off the train
I must hunt I must eat I must drink
These things are the things that I am
She struggled as I drank and I drank
She whispered prayers and sobbing for mercy
I stagger away full of blood and throbbing shame
Yet not shame
But the diseased remnants of shame
Something about her made me have to have her
She tasted of iron and rusty like old armour
She tasted young and she tasted of some warm hope
Afterwards I hurry away
I scurry away down the crooked lanes and I climb over walls
I balance on roofs and I creep up the tiles
I lurk in the river’s mists unnoticed by the rank and file
The more I drink the more I want to drink
The summer here is weak and rainy and the sun rarely shines
I come out in the long tepid grey afternoons
An unexplained magic means I attract little attention
In the warm drizzle beyond a doorway
And the moths in the lamplight and rain
The stupid police barking up a hundred wrong trees
The people go about their nights with caution
It makes my life harder if indeed this is a life
It makes the ice bite deeper in the street
And cruel black birds who follow me cawing hoarsely
The sights and sounds of London disgust me
The people seem ill and stunted and dirty
Then suddenly a flash of some profanely beautiful woman
The chimneys pumping out that awful smoke
Horses and ugly children and unmentionable things being cooked
Give me a forest any day
A dense tangle of dead trees around a disused wishing well
Where the white lilies float in the black lake as the snow falls silently
Sweet silence of no living thing
December 24, 1888. Dublin
Tonight a rabble has chased me and an urchin cast a stone
I stoop panting in the shadow of a castle
The mud up to my ankles
My skinny shins all chafed and in sores
Some terrible creature has emptied its stomach in the street
Nearby another has cast up its accounts of black beer
It’s too cold to snow and some places reek of cold holiness
I hate Christ and I hate Mary and I hate God
I hate the devil who made me this way
I curse the day that I wandered down this gruesome street
I spend my time hidden in the earth on a ship
I want and I burn with the wanting
I sleep but my dreams are burning too
I wake up scorched in the freezing place I have found to sleep
In the gap between two floors in a boarding house by the river
I wait out the days that are short and are freezing
I feel the cold I feel the hunger
I remember the daughter of the poet
How I took her hand and led her down under the ground
And the winter was at its height and it towered all white
The houses that kept out no cold and no ghost
All huddled together in a shambles of crumbling wood and cracked plaster
The squelch of a shoe out there in the mud
In all my lamplit horror I will be discovered
I can see my eyes my animal eyes
Which can see I am an animal
Swift and shrewd and ruthless as I feed
I am delighted by the red of blood on the grey snow
March 3, 1892. Outside Zurich
A nasty policeman has found my bolt-hole
So I’m lingering in a cemetery in the hills
Misty and lit by a sick old moon
I am the cliche villain it occurs to me
I feast on the blood of poor peasants
Leaving them dreaming damned or dead I don’t care
All the same anyway in the end I’m cold and I’m hungry again
Wandering up a cold road at dusk shivering in my miserable skin
There is no warm hearth or cup of warm wine
Waiting for me at the end of the street
No one dares speak or even knows my name
Wind whistles through broken glass and dogs howl far away
I am known to the thorn and the broken grave
Wrought iron angel with rust for hair
A path through the woods where lovers once had their trysts
A golden spider catching black fat flies
Spring is still sleeping in a darkened cave
An afternoon in a field as the yellow stars came out
Overland and on the run I traverse the continents and the years
A sad song begins the violins will start up
Wine is poured and commiserations made
No stranger to the coffin myself I am a study in grief
Time ticks into eternity and everything’s reborn
Then everything returns again unto dust
September 19, 1900. Amsterdam
Abandoned windmill halfway into town hiding from the Politie
Secretly I hope they will catch me and end all of this
In a puddle a reflection more rodent than man
A sodden bed of earth where I try to sleep
Another reverie of youth quickly deforms
In a black and white world with monochrome villages
I followed a witch into a wood of hazel trees
She lifted her skirts and it was done standing up
She laughed and she spat and she drifted away
I drank her magical blood from her whitest neck
It was ambrosia and it was poison at the same time
That was long ago and faraway
when a woman would still
look upon me
In a city of merchants with their plump wives and daughters
I hunted at midnight in the alleys and lanes
In orchestra pits and cloakrooms and kitchens
In libraries of books unread and forgotten
In a courtyard at early morning’s first light the broken path
Cracked sundial and weedy loam
The cathedral knells in the distance across the fields of poppies
Even I don’t know of all the horrors to come
I sense it sometimes when I hear a train
Or come across a dead bird on my path
And the murmuring fountains that spout no more
A soldier with one leg begs for guilders
He belongs in this scene a piece of the puzzle
He stinks of hospitals and pity and scorn
I take in everything and put it all together
I’m always looking around for some quick exit
I need to know what I’m dealing with
I need to know the lay of the land
September 23, 1900. Amsterdam
And yet for all of everything I still fall in love easily
So easily like a child or a small dog I am stricken
I saw her today in the doorway of a church
She did not see me for I was covered in the shadow
With her auburn hair and her white skin
Haloed against the black maw of the church
Oh how I loved her then
And how I hated that church
I wondered how old she was in this new century?
Perhaps 20 or 21 I really am undecided
Her eyes seem green to me
That’s how I would certainly prefer them
Her lips red
Her nostrils black
Her veins so feint blue in her swanlike neck
Elegant she seemed to me in her simple clothes
Holding a small navy bible in her bony hand
She gazed up into the sky like a prophetess
A sybil foreseeing all the terrible destruction still to come
I wondered about her name
I imagined her childhood
Her mother bathing her in a tub on summers evening
Eating wild raspberries and cream in a field with her friends and brothers
I longed for her and everything she was
I loved her like a cat may love a small bird
I loved her as a bear pawing at honey and yet the swarm of bees
I wanted to absorb her into me and bathe in her exalted ray
Bring her flowers I’ve stolen from a cemetery vase
Sing her words from an old drinking song I once heard
Perhaps my old voice could sing of other times too
If she couldn’t see me yes oh then I would croon
Romania and winter in her mountains
How the snow would swirl around my high room in the castle
The bare trees in silhouette against the whitest sky
The long years of night
My morning-less life in margins and corridors
A crow in the air caws as it flies
The candlelight writhing throwing shapes on a wall
The cold crisp air in the room holding me awake and shivering
Of all this and more I would sing to her and perhaps she could understand
How the love for her just this once glimpsed roars through my blood
And the screaming need for her rips open my ears like bells ringing too loudly
I shrink back into my latest hole like the rodent that I am become
Still she fills my leathery spirit with a sickening hope that I despise
And as sleep claims me
It is her face I see on the borders of my dreams
October 2, 1900. Amsterdam
I follow her to a graveyard where she lays daisies on a cross
On a sullen autumn afternoon that has dried and cracked my hands
No birdsong disturbs the stillness here
World’s end at the end of the world
Even time seems dead as she kneels and she prays
The clouds stopped in the sky
The sun forever hidden only the faintest palest stain on grey
The worms still in the earth
The earth still in the sky
The sky still above her softly falling auburn tresses
The sky matt on her shining white skin
Her slender fingers pressing together
Squeezing her Jesus out with sheer force
An entreaty to a god so faraway and distant in his heaven
A cruel and jealous god who has surely created me
I who am concealed in this afternoon
Licking my lips and wringing my hands
So cold and ugly even in here where I am
And with all my damaged heart and my broken love
And with caked blood cloak watching from the gloom
No beginner to necropolis or tomb
I hate life
I love death
Why should it be otherwise?
So she prays and I watch and everything stops
Cancelled out by each other these two actions produce a nothingness
Trapped in this second forever I could well imagine a terrible panic
The stretching out of time causes a vile nausea in my entrails and in my mind
In this eternity her god turns towards us at last
He smiles at her tender words
And his eyes penetrate me in my hidden miasma
And he is filled with disgust
And he turns away and is gone
I know now my endless days are coming to an end
The limitless has been bound by a broken slender thread
I will be discovered
Or some impending war will obliterate me
And I will be tortured and burnt and hung and shattered
And I will be hounded and hunted until then
I just grin to myself
The girl is still kneeling in prayer
Just to see her brings me some horrible joy
I will watch and wait forever then
Although forever is now foreshortened I’m sure
December 25, 1900. Romania
Shot it would seem by a silver bullet
My black life now ebbs away in a congealing trickle
Under my clothes I am drenched in it
They finally got me as it always had to be
Everything is laid out you know
All of this had to happen for some reason
Lured into a village where I saw a pretty girl
I followed her into the orchard beyond the candlelight
A premonition of the end was there waiting for me
The father stepped out from behind a tree with a rifle
and blasted
Lying in wait he must have been
Silver bullet worming its way into my old rotten heart
Still I will strangle him and throw him into the river
And somehow stagger back here
Feeling whatever this life is supposed to be
leave me
So long ago I came into this world
Might as well have been yesterday
All the horses and carts
All the summers and winters
All the Christs on their crosses
The beautiful women and the ugly old ladies
The handsome young men and the useless old fools
The castles and the forests and the long silent hibernation
Lamplight and crackling fires
And the lovely snow falling
Noel Noel goodwill to all men
The bells will ring at midnight
And by then I will be wherever I’m going
One day they’ll find me turned to dust in these ruins
In a lovely time when I will not exist
And angels will wander this earth not monsters
And finally a peace has come to Europe
And a new morning born to this world
Now I feel oblivion upon me
Gnawing at the knots that keep me here
I will close my eyes
And finally I’ll surrender