Musings From Oblivion's Vault

After the banality of the first post, I thought it would be nice to post the following prose piece, originally published in The Doppelganger Broadsheet (edited by Mr Colin Langeveld of West Derby, Liverpool, England) in 1997. A sunset of topaz falls over forests bronzen and amberous with autumn; and in a grove, sacred with the ghosts of antique prayers, a poet, wrapped in a robe of hyacinthine velvet, stands before an altar of carven marble on which he has placed ebony grapes, saffron-hued fruits, and blossoms of exquisite fragrances and gemmed tints. A faun reclines nearby, hidden in the copper grasses, and listens as the poet recites to the rich eventide from an unfurled scroll. Emerald and sapphire: Forest and ocean. Garnet and amethyst: Dawn and eventide. These are the bones, The bones of my dreams. Waves foam white, Curdled pale jewels. Woods sigh solemnly, Breath as incense. These are the bones, The bones of my dreams. Rain of garnet, Dawn on woods. Sky of almandine, Ado

All this is very odd indeed: I'm on a week's holiday from the library, which I intended to devote to finishing off a new short story. However, although I have been working very hard on said story - A Mansion of Silent Ravens - I have not been working as hard as I should be. Everything, whilst writing, will become a distraction to me: a row of books that need tidying (when I should be writing); dust on a shelf that must now, this instant, be wiped away (when I should be writing); browsing through books, which I haven't given a thought to in decades, but which suddenly become very enticing indeed, like blossoms with gorgeously alien hues and alluring perfumes (when I really should be writing); popping into the garden after lunch only to find, four hours later, that I'd been vigorously weeding and hoeing, pruning shrubs, dead-heading plants, and somehow washed all the garden ornaments (when I definitely should have been writing). And now I find that I have set up a