Edgar Allan Esq.

A more acidulous and perspicacious
witness to the dissolution of
my sanity, I bid you do not
seek.

I descend from a race gone
mad before me, and have driven
all my intimates and cronies
as well from all hold upon
the most rare and peculiar
sense by my intimacies. Crones

And the wretchedly, excessively
aged alone have proved proof
against the grotesque airs
and repulsive ambiance I carry,
seemingly with me, to impose
itself upon all occasions
and events I occasion
to haunt with myself. Indeed,

if you'd but stay your hand
to slay me later after much
resort to wine has dulled
your loathing, and replaced
this unseemly (and you will
learn, unbidden) fury of reproach
with an eye less calculating
than cold, a tale I could unfold
in the telling that would still
your very disbelief in that act
of your reason's frantic rejection
of it. Intrigue?

Yes, and of so cunning and subtly
false a design that even I could
not detect the warp of its weft
until I was so caught up
in its web, I had become myself
the spider. Listen, then,
as you seek to be amused,
to prove yourself quite
immune to the lunacies

that have conspired from within
the outer cosmos as if to contract,
sign, address, witness and draw you
here.

It began like this. Amiss, and
- condemn me mot if in my present
misery, I indulge in a detailed
reminiscence of acts, a rehearsal
of facts long-since bruited in
hushed tones abroad, at least
in my mind the clamor and infamy
of my name compels me to stroll
down memory lane in so leisurely
and lounging a saunter and traipse

That perhaps you for your part
may glean some glint of the rich
tints, deep brocades and sumptuous
hangings which adorned my too-brief
fleeting respites, my idylls snatched
from the gaps between limbs of monstrous
ordeals and this groaning, overbearing sense
of persecution, which - imagined, your eyes may
say - nevertheless appalls even I, as I give
at best, a sober account. My childhood passed
as do most, in the past, yielding to a deep ripening
in me of the omens and characteristics others had long
since noted with foreboding: a sense of the outre, a
relentless, keening despair over practical jokes, and
above all, a hunger in my breast for some great and
permanent bond of love, no less perverse than
perverted. It was fate, perhaps

That decreed I was to have both all,
and neither. Yet I tarried mightily, protesting
that these dreams that pressed like fevered breasts
against my palpable face were real, and that like I,
I would have them, and to the fullest imaginable
reality. You may laugh. Thank you, but

It was no joke I had grown into, groaning
with a humor no less fine than wan, and ill. My friends
had been abjuring me for some time: fuck off. My enemies
welcomed me to their bosom only to ply me with the most
disgusting libations and fare, and watch sports endlessly,
yelling. Such sport was not for me. I made a rarified air
and left. So it was that, perhaps as fate decreed,

I found myself alone. No judging eye beheld,
as I scanned my reflection in a pane of random
glass and noted - not without a certain and
savage satisfaction - it wept. Good. Heaven
itself could rend and downcast its lightning
-cracked veil, and I would scoop it from its
descent midair, wrapping it around me for
a shawl! I performed such stunts listlessly
and often in those days, affecting a perfunctory
manner that afflicts me still, and in all things
reeks odious, and false.

Eventually, I came to the point. Some bad shit
happened in a way you simply will not believe,
and dazed, you got up, forgetting your purpose
and your weapon in your rush to leave.

Nevermore to return, of course.