UNMASKED
Cloaked in a pall of heavy dark velvet I whisperingly stride one step at a time, retiring to a deep seclusion – pestilence raging most furiously abroad. A lighted candelabrum braced in my right hand and a brace of an august cask of ruby red wine under my left arm, and the stems of two globular glasses locked between the ring, middle and pointer fingers of the left hand, upward on the spiral staircase, short of the catwalks and turrets pausing on the castellated central middle floors of an imperial suite, a long and straight vista without colourful tapestries or golden ornaments, conceivably to find my phantasm therein; with neither desire of ingress or egress and without the folly of grief I pour the wine at a gray weathered farm table illuminated humbly by the candlelight. Somewhere without, a pendulum swings, it’s monotonous clang nearly muffled by the verdant canopy surrounding the stronghold. Tall in habiliments darker and more dense than mine own the phantom of the castle of my mind enters and silently we salute each other with a clink of the fine hand blown glass and then a long draft of the rich spicy shiraz, and with the music unhushed, toast again, paying tribute to dissolution at bay.
