Diary of a Drug Fiend

The Grinding of the Brakes 181 were dissolved into one; a giant ghost that enveloped us. I hissed the next lines through my teeth, feeling myself a fire-breathing dragon. ** Horror indeed intense, Seduction ever intenser, Swinging the smoke of sense From the bowl of a smouldering censer ! ”’ We were out of breath. My boy sat on the edge of the bed. I crept up behind him. I shook out my hair all over his face, and dug my nails into his scalp. We were living the heroin life, the life of the world of the soul. We had identified ourselves with the people of the poem. He was the poet, wreathed with poppies, with poisonous poppies that corrupted his blood, and I was the phantom of his delirium, the hideous vampire that obsessed him. Little drops of blood oozed from his scalp and clotted to black under my greedy nails. He spoke the next lines as if under some cruel compulsion. The words were wrenched from him by some overwhelming necessity. His tone was colourless, as if the ultimate anguish had eaten up his soul. And all this agony and repulsion exercised a foul fascination. He suffered a paroxysm of pleasure such as pleasure itself had never been able to give him. And I was Olya, I was his love, his wife, world without end, the demon whose supreme delight was to destroy him. “‘ Behind me, behind and above, She stands, that mirror of love. Her fingers are subtle-jointed ; Her nails are polished and pointed, And tipped with spurs of gold: With them she rowels the brain. Her lust is critical, cold ; And her Chinese cheeks are pale,