BLASTED OBSCURITY

Secretly a bit of a new guilty conscience again; I've outlived myself by another messy year. I've been a bit of a cheat and a traitor, and even a shipwrecked Robinson, if I look within myself, because I had to play chess with happiness in secret so that no one would see my tears.

From my grotesque age my idyllic youth is nowhere to be found. I've squandered my better hopes of what the future might hold. - What to some may be tragicomedy To the likes of me may be merit. I'm not ashamed to have lived as I did, as Damocles' fate despised me. I was a bachelor beggar who had yet to win a pitying glance or pity - not enough.

Proud, rathar perc-men spin all fortune's mill-wheels for their own profit. The haunted moonlit night, strewn with mist, still shines on me with the blast of an orb. The barns have all gone to bed. The port-oases of my childhood are now broken up and forced into exile by calculating compromise; the knowledge that I can hardly be worth anything, for my redeeming love, my immortal beloved, is always late.

In suspected times, he who has been repeatedly in the deep dungeons of earthly hells is reluctant to try to save himself. Self-abashed, I turn inward while my befriended shadow the cowering darkness. And though a stifling chill of desperate apocalypticism emanates from its draughty corners, the tamed beasts of this existence growl and hope at the same time...