Tangier

White sepulchre of sex, bordello of death,
Labyrinth of weary souls gone to seed,
Is it true that any taste can be satisfied here, at a price?
What a fool I am, have always been,
To seek the Garden of the Hesperides.
Lassitude haunts the narcotic air.
We are all between the legs of this nonchalant old whore.
Here, no desire is unholy,
Delicious horror is yours to enjoy;
No petty rules inhibit, no shame dictates,
This is life, over-ripe, freefalling from the tree.

Only the quick and the hard survive.
This fabulous monster tolerates no weakness;
At the first scent of blood it moves in for the kill.

Too many influences in the blood
Confuse and debauch the listless mind;
Fever frenzies the spirit,
Chaos laughs in the throbbing stones.
Beneath the reckless gaiety:
The kef of sightless staring eyes.

Arrive in hope and expectation,
Find what you wish to find, believe what you wish to believe,
And, forgetting yourself, go astray and stay too long,
Until at last you realise what you have become,
A prisoner, a victim, lost to the world.

Smiling, the vampire fastens on your jugular
And sucks the life from your veins in blissful dream,
Making you one of his own.

This city was built with fantasies and intrigues,
Made to satisfy the polymorphous perversions
Of perpetual adolescents, embryos of men.
The only truth is your own delusion,
The only sanity the madhouse kind.


This is the edge, a place out of time,
Where nothing happens and days pass unnoticed,
Governed by black magic,
Beguiling the unwary with trompe l’oeil.
We are all actors here, reared on the impossible,
Walking lopsided on a tilted surface,
Drugged with sensation, jaded from the lifetime before.