"Taedium Vitae: A Love Letter to Death"

Cobwebs...my head is all filled with cobwebs
Shimmering in my mind like shrouds for long-dead dreams.
Are they remnants of past joys or vestiges of my madness?
Do they harbinger the coming of death in the night,
As I lounge upon my gilded bed, desiring only you,
The masked figure in black, bearing the scythe of oblivion?

No longer do I seek sweet ecstasy, only bitterest oblivion
For a life that should long ago have been consigned to the cobwebs,
For the malady of ennui that can only be alleviated by you,
The terrible figure of nightmare that haunts my sweetest dreams
As even my happiest memories descend into the emptiness of night,
Leaving nothing but an empty shell, a desire, and cruel madness.

Always I sought sensation and pleasure, but found only madness.
My blood runs torpid in my veins, sinking me into languid oblivion
As the blue opium smoke curls upward, lending delusion to the night
Until all I see are ghosts from my past, as deathly pale as cobwebs.
I want to travel the dark road that leads to the end of hope and dreams
For I know what I shall find at the end of that fatal road: you.

Too much have I known of life, and drained it to the lees. Only you
Can shed me of my secrets and heal the poison of my madness.
Wine and women no longer sate me; all I crave is the absence of dreams.
No longer do I seek delicious sins to ward off my own oblivion;
All the chambers of my pleasure palace are mired in cobwebs
And no longer can I know the brightness of day, only perfect night.

Take me, I beg you; free me from the specters who haunt the night.
I, who never pled for anything from life, now plead for you
To come unravel these unseen shackles, these binding cobwebs
That tether me to the earth and to my encroaching madness;
I, who never surrendered before, will gladly drown in your oblivion.
Will you take pity on me, who has walked so long in waking dreams?

I implore you, O Death, let me not subsist alone on dreams
Of you, but grant me mercy and the kindness of an eternal night
As devoid of fears and old sorrows as the blackest oblivion.
Seize me, embrace me me, for I have no strength left but to desire you.
Come to me like an angel of darkness, and fill me with love's madness
With your beauty, until my mind is withered to mere cobwebs.

Here I am, in the shadows of the night, longing only for you.
Come make a reality of my dreams and a mockery of my madness,
Come bring me into oblivion and bury me at last beneath the cobwebs.

Penned by my hand on the 22nd of Aeguary, in the year 426 AF.