Missive of the Grotesque and Arabesque (Or "A Letter From an Opium Smoker")

And so that, during a horrid nighte populated by tall shadows and tenebricose cracks, I came to write this missive to Lady Romani-Softbutt, 196th Countess of Chicley:

"...Duske has come 'eavily, and my cabinet's Bactrian carpets are agitated on the rugose walls by a wind which comes from Heavens not

my worked minde has been agitated in thousands misgivings: Ghastly homilies of pang and the hours gnarled pendulum oscillating on mine niveous bones: 

Bones! Bones! 

Bones which I shall not see 'til the terminal sepulchre and its macabre toll: Tomb and terminus of all my laudanum chimères, given myself -as well- to any sort of meretricious intercourse and putage, suffering as a result this disgraceful disease, the 'French malady' as called usually it is, which takes me to indulge ignominiously in to another pipe of opium now, now, ah! Ah!

And what for?

Black days and white nightes dancing in motley gown at the masking ball of luciferine gaseous splendour? 

For what, my obdurated vices constructed a fane at the marblean feet of my well-loved Lady Romani, thyself: 

Absolutely inebriated in to the vaporous oceans of my mother opium to forget, to remember not, hallucinated by the star shining on the yellow Corinth at nighte: 

Oh Lady-Love; thou who hast the fatal gift of beauty, laurel and thunder on my sublunar visions, witch from Megara or Avernal dryad: Leave, leave my worked minde alone! 

Styxes and Meanders, seas of laudanum tea are not enough to bury the odium, while I sink my nada into the soft entrails of the raving ignis fatuus and the phantasy perhaps: 

The heavy Abaddon path, possibly?

Burning with ardent modesty at your snow-clad feet: 

Matildus Mantecon-Cockburn"