The Reveller's End

Adapted, edited, reassembled with slight alterations in favour of verity of time, and of punctuation, from an autobiographical work or rather works with various titles written, destroyed, re-written, re-destroyed, I can't recall how many times, in the mid 1990s, period during which I constantly toiled on stories, novels, even plays; and much of this work was subsequently shredded, binned, thrown down drains, into dustbins etc. The 16th of January 1993 was a Sunday, and I feel positive that the events depicted in "The Reveller's End" took place on that Sunday.

It was late
in the afternoon of
the 16th of January
Nineteen Ninety Three
that my whole
intoxicated universe
finally and definitively exploded...
with etiolated face...tremulous hands,
broken at last, broken at last...
after so many years of
semi-Icaran hubris.
And yet it had all been
so unexpected;
because although I'd felt
distinctly dreamy
and disconnected
earlier on in the day,
as if I was no longer quite
of this earth...
I was in astonishingly good spirits,
even euphoric...
so there was no reason at all
for me to start fearing
that I wasn't entirely indestructible,
let alone suspect
that I was destined
for an out and out "crack up"...
and the most fearful ordeal so far
of my stormy, chaotic,
almost inchoate existence...