Are they gone, after midnight? Like a cheap movie ploy, open in the strip club, naked breasts squeeze a pole. Candy, Tiffany, whoever, plays to my god and rids me of Him and I am possessed. I turn. I come. I hide. She hangs like a bat and it is rich dark satisfying and promises what it cannot deliver. Still I linger, the flesh, the form, the feminine dissolution, the devil they long for and are, not a being or entity but a creation to wrest immortality from decay to prolong the sin. Satan deliver me, that’s who I am and two lap dancers see him in my eyes and it spurs their sensuality. I am weak. I come. That’s my sex allowed.

At the Louvre I indulge. It is overpowering, too much gold, too much beauty, too much inspiration to absorb. Perfection is painful longing. I hunger for the same as the strip club: ecstasy. The supernal, the transcendent, the revelation, the release from corporeal self, to conflate into the denial, the Lucifer mutiny, the white stone sepulcher with dead eternal rapturous bliss, soulless eyes pull me into emotionless depths, the sweet death of betrayal and pain. I need to experience it all. Paris proffers but it is not the Paris of dreams, of the 20s, of artistic freedom, the anarchy. Did it exist then? I am a pariah because I do not bend to the order and submit to fascist will.

On a side street Police stop me and threaten, get this: my bicycle riding was illegal. Do you know what you did? I am not an idiot so I deny. No witnesses, a sadistic black cop will hit, that close. My handlers would not be pleased. Reluctantly he returns my passport and I pedal away, unchastened. Fuck the corrupt asshole. Whose orders were they?

 Music everywhere. Experimental rock and jazz on the cutting edge, but they are constrained, under the thumb, repressed and obedient. No breakthroughs, stagnated, held in check. It’s either that or no voice. I choose silence, the voice of chaos. I am the danger to the order. Art is not art unless it serves art and that is the liberation, the timelessness, the freedom, the break from social matrix and constraint, the transcendence. And this cannot be tolerated, it subverts the order. I am not disillusioned. I am vindicated.

 I meet a woman on a train, Chinese. She speaks French and Chinese and I speak a smattering of each and it is enough to meet for dinner at an expensive restaurant on the Champs de Elyse. What her eyes divulge and what the order decrees diverge and so what could have been is not, despite the wine. I will not be fucked unless I pay the fee, the surrender. Sell out. I refuse, it defeats the purpose which is vague and sans tangible reward. Why do I do it? I will not give up my art. I am my art. I am my own creation regardless. These are sovereign choices but I am not unique.

The antiquity man runs his bookstore near the Seine, across from Notre Dame. He has to have seen, to have known, to have spoken with them all, maybe not Hugo. He sits silently beside me on a bench and his one piece of advice is “let go.” I know what he means but I am conventional, too prosaic, defined by expectation, by narrative, by verbosity and extravagance, I need the story—maybe not me, but the audience I do not have and pander to, the Hollywood script. Caught between two worlds as I have always been, never committing to either: the avant garde, the mundane, the steppenwolf poised between propriety and release. This should be my answer and resolution. How can I be a coward when I have slain all my dragons but one: let go.

I return to the Middle East to my job in a strict Muslim fold. Succubi return with me and haunt my sleep and fill me with bliss; my cock swells with violent joy with each sin and descent, but the holy men in pure white robes banish the sisters from my mind. From subconscious inspiration, the Louvre, the strippers, I draw nude women on larges scale, figures with elongated necks, inflated loins and breasts, delirious in pose and rife with symbol and forbidden, not good not evil but other. That is the struggle, to escape each. But furtively the meddling robed men enter my keep for eternal vigilance is the cost of oppression and are stunned by the visages in the holy land, and while they do not rip them from the walls, they impose sanctions on my art. It is this I cannot abide and I leave the hypocrisy of 17 heavenly virgins, my models fucked out.

I do not know where to go. I know I need the story and if I keep writing it will emerge, but not yet. I am a late bloomer. Insanity captivated me for years. I was harmless, always gentle, tolerated and abused and betrayed, naïve and perceptive, and blind. The order sees latent kings, so they corrupt and destroy them. If they will not succumb to vice then they are endlessly thwarted by political machines and driven mad. They will not reign. I am a king in a country which will not acknowledge royalty. It is a myth and anachronism. Tyrants are the substitute. Crowns are mocked and appropriated and stolen until all men are kings. We leave them to fairy tales, to movies, one and the same.

 I cannot tell my own story. You would not believe. I would title it: What I know but cannot tell. My return to sanity is the acceptance and practice of the banal and the denial, or silencing, of the reality. But the order closely watches me. I am a prisoner who hides the tunnel dirt in my cuffs and discards it when the pervasive eye, the perversity blinks. They cannot see all. This is their fear and the cause of their cruelty: whatever escapes them. Power will not abide a leak. Will not abide loss of control. Cannot risk incipient liberty and so crushes it: the kings, the art. The King of Art is made a fool and his eyes are plucked and his heart is riddled and shorn.

I am Prometheus. I am Samson. I am Masada, the Alamo, the last man standing. I am the pariah. I have seen that which should not be seen, know what cannot be known and remain sane. The old bookseller stands at my side. Let go, he says. They already revile you. Why cling to hope. The only way is onward. All right, I answer, but I lie. Hope is my last refuge. I have no belief, no faith, rather a plethora of gods, major and minor, secreted in woods, innate in water, manifest in serpent, wise and powerful, impatient, cruel, merciless, unrepentant. If I let go I lose the narrative, I am rudderless, my audience, look at me, listen, I am leaving. I am going where you dare not follow. Yet this is what I have always done and why I have loved the lie and delusion, and why I have not been heard though I am worthy.

You climbed too high Icarus, but it wasn’t for vanity or ambition’s sake, it wasn’t willful disobedience. It was because you could see more, thrill more than anyone. What would cause this reckless courage but the desire to out-perform, out-glory, out-explore, discover and unravel the hidden, the secret, the forbidden, and seek revelation? It is your soul, your hunger for the source.

Fuck life, fuck death, I just want to return: I wrote when was 25, but I was guessing, impressing an impressionable woman with my philosophy. She was the teacher. She saved and abandoned me long after I left for her infidelity: Went back to her jealous lover for a tryst, so I fucked the upstairs neighbor; no, I tried, and she made me ill, the neighbor. Bitch.

This self-indulgent crap will be edited out, but I have to spew before I can pontificate before I can reveal before I can elucidate before I can, and this I hold most valuable, entertain. Fuck enlightenment. I lost too many friends because of its allure. The old man says “lie,”and an old friend says what about me? You would each betray me for a woman, as I would you. The old man says mmmm?

I go on after I have lost so much: family, women, friends, health, innocence (good riddance to innocence), truth-telling (good riddance for the most part). I’m lying. I’m bitter, but not as much as I once was, bitterness with no bottom until the one priest I’ve ever listened to, a young blessed man in Mexico, halted my fall. I would betray him in a second for a woman and pleasure. That is the way of the world. Hawthorne was right. I am young Goodman Brown no more, thank my ironic god.

 You are still bitter, the old man says, and I ask how old were you before you understood the futility of it? Or, it just fell away with the ravages of time? Leave me out this, he replies: let go.

When I have a story to tell I can write it: no problem. I need an outline, a plot in place. This is not a writer’s workshop! It is exploratory, masturbatory, inventory. It is loathsome. Hate. God, wearying hate. The coward can’t hate alone, the fucking pussy. In my pre-bitter days my sensitive soul cowered, but discovery of, not allegiance to, the devil saved me. Freed me is more accurate, though they are much the same. I was awfully sweet and considerate but I have discovered the dark secret they carry with them. The order nurtures them, uses them, protects them. They are the agents of the underworld. I am the blasphemer of all. The outcast. The middle course.

If I have no plot, then can I do character sketches? Why not? One villain is never enough, neither is a score. It is not the evil who defeat me, it is the good. This makes charity villainous, those who believe themselves good, those who are bound by arbitrary rule to hold the order in place for a few. Example: You suffer pain and I empathize. Am I good? No. I am a vampire, I feed on your emotion. Let go. I can’t go on. There is nothing for me. This is tripe. Try again. I will go on because of hope? The inflection goes up in cowardly fashion. Hope^.

I cannot tell the story I am avoiding. I cannot see the story I am avoiding. I can give it to my characters, but they have to love because a character without love is a shell, one-dimensional. Not necessarily. Is Dracula single-faceted? Yes, he is purely appetite, half of man’s psychic resume: vanity and appetite. His supporting cast are pathetic. Explain his existence. The laws of physics prohibit a literal explanation. I will break it down into my parts. One, he is immortal. Two, he drinks blood. Three, he is evil incarnate. But why evil? because he kills? He kills like the tiger, only to feed, and only what is necessary to live, or survive. The tiger is not evil. So is the vampire evil because he kills to eat or is the soldier? Why else is he evil? Because he is eternal? God is eternal. A good man is promised life everlasting. But we created the rules of goodness. Satan is evil because we fear him. We fear our enemies. We fear the unknown. We fear God’s antithesis. We fear God. We fear illness.

Here is one explanation of the vampire myth. If our appetites exceed our moral capacity to justify them, if we break natural and universal law, then we remain on the everlasting self-propagating physical plane. But the undeniable spiritual spark alive in all sentient flesh seeks to go on. Those who forsake the spark for physical pleasure without constraint, sell the spark to the material god, or anti-god who lives forever in the flesh until the universe implodes back into the abstract. This was Lucifer’s revolt! But spark is the reality, no, not reality, rather the telos, Aristotle’s end or purpose. Flesh is the illusion and the hard reality. Hard to accept with fleshy eyes and beating heart. The telos end is no end, the beating heart ceases and lies quiet in the vampire’s breast until the blood flows, in their fantasy. Everyone wakes from death, good and evil alike. But there is a crucial difference which explains our vampire fiend. Those who choose the beyond wake and eventually come to grips with death and with the help of guides move on. But the evil wake in their coffins below the ground and cannot disassociate from rotting flesh. Disbelief turns to panic to horror and to madness and extinction of spark. Those left behind glean the horrible truth, and still choose blood appetite, and create the myth of the eternal life. I think I know what I am doing, but still it is no story. My depression drags me into sleep, into catatonic despair and I resist the cure, temporary as it always is, but now I have transferred it into painting. My Prozac is the brush and colored form. The torment ceases. I know what I do. I sacrifice for my art. I let the gods and universe enter with the madness which knows no surcease without constant creation: craft and imagination out of time.