My one friend and master has bestowed upon me an embarrassment of courses, confusedly piled like the unwashed dishes after a supper of too much wine and too little regret Inebriated with the sweetness of his corrupting profligacy, I run like blattarian critter scrambling amongst the plates when the lights get suddenly switched on To run a course through his labyrinthian desire means the seeking of escape, yet for the clues are so abundant our very start is but a delusion and thus all epiphany vain Still, in the stupor of my inchoate neurological wiring, I remain convinced there is light - and so grievously blind am I, sodden from looking too long, that confusing conviction for a feeble suspicion seems like the Tao of Nirvana Oh the irony that even such hollow musings appear to my intellectual retina like the faint threnody of the stars! But such is our fate, that the optical nerve moves not light from the pupil to the cortex, nor wisdom from the master, but the Vedic illusion of Occidental disillusionment My gift is not these verses that I offer, but what I'm given. The present, gift-wrapped in the pretty iconology of the prism and girdled with the short ribbons of Chronos, is for me and me alone, in all its wonder Yet, the gift isn't really mine; not because the Autumn trees haven't strewn their ochres and ambers on the ground for me to tread upon, nor because my soul isn't aroused to profound melancholy with each succeeding winter, nor still because I haven't left myself wide open for the susurrous lamentations of angels who would decry my insincerity in entering their kingdom 'Tis for none of these reasons but that to claim a thing as one's own - what child, lion and vulture do naturally - demands a communion with God afforded not the likes of me who has imbibed recklessly, vomited wantonly, worshipped in the cathedral of my ego where brilliance dwells only in the breast of darkness. Let none hence say I wasn't given for all are forgiven - no matter their transgression but only that I refused what was so earnestly placed before me 3-XII-2011