POET FINDS LOST WORK
When Lizzie Siddal, the wife of Dante Gabriel Rossetti died of am overdose of laudanum, the distraught Rossetti had his unpublished poems buried with her in her grave in London’s Highgate Cemetery. Eight years later, when he felt creatively tapped out, he had the coffin exhumed, retrieved the verses and published them.
I must confess that I haven’t been writing too much poetry myself lately, (maybe for kindred reasons to DGR) but, maybe because of how they have this bullshit planet set up, there’s plenty else to write about so I wasn’t bothered. Then, over Xmas, aside from attempting all the bonhomie my system would stand, I was also moving files from an old computer to a new one, I happened across a file of a piece that must have been written around 1986-7, in the Tijuana Bible days, that I had totally for gotten about. It is titled…

THE LADIES OF THE VAMPIRE CLUB
It is possible that I have spent too much of my life in the company of The Ladies Of The Vampire Club but, like Otis Redding once remarked, it's too late to stop now

My mind drifts back to night-complex self destruction, the synaptic crapshoot at suicide's edge that we knew as fun, the blatancy of things past, and, above all The Ladies Of The Vampire Club. Now what was the name of that place? The afterhours bunker, fashionable slum haunt out on Avenue C? Where you had to look as though you had just come from an appointment with your personal embalmer to circumvent the Sumo wrestler guardian of the velvet rope, and mingle with the girls who never saw the sun.

The Ladies Of The Vampire Club

And those lairs wherein they lurked, Ninth Street railroad walkups transformed to Spider Queen salons in which they courted and held court, and drank the blood of servants among their relics, the human skulls, the Chinese cymbals, the Arabian mandolins, and the severed index fingers of paramours who had lost their roll of the dice to the soft hiss and cold breath across pearl white fangs of

The Ladies Of The Vampire Club

And those moments of rage that not even ice blue valium could mitigate when, as all too often they believed they had not been used appropriately or accorded the measure of emotional control they viewed as their right. Those moments of rage like the howl of driving rain and the deafening crash of night-thunder around the granite turrets of the castle, scattering the walking wounded of Valhalla with their epic Wagnerian Nazi-scream "Where is the gasoline for my tanks?"And finally the satisfaction, the curled kitten retraction of fangs and claws when rage was spent and guilt instilled, and the otherwise required effects had been achieved. They took no prisoners The Ladies Of The Vampire Club, for they were possessed of a supernatural instinct, for gauging the exact moment when pleasure prolonged could transcend to torture in the beating of their soft leather wings.

It is possible that I have spent too much of my life in the company of The Ladies Of The Vampire Club, but, like Otis Redding once remarked, it's too late to stop now.