Identity Theft!

I may have become the victim of an identity theft. I am very concerned that the person I am is no longer the person that I thought I was. I look in the mirror, and out stares John the Baptist, bedraggled and disheveled, waiting for an outbound hound to take me over the divide and into an unfamiliar river system, filled with tiny leeches and limitless cobwebs. There are caves here, and none but the most lurid lights shine from somewhere up ahead. There is no wind, and the green and purple slime on the dripping walls keep me from the promise I made so long ago, the pact that forces me onward, to never turn back, to find the way, to take another bong hit, when to do so would be folly. I hear the ancient voices of children, the scream in the rigging, the sickening yaw and twist of the hull, the latent memory of hatches popping, ready to ditch, salvaging nothing but the last figurine, the one my mother held, just before the end of alabaster, the dull gleam and a still night, waiting to split an invisible sky, furious veins, erratically branching sulphurously yellow, and yearning for the alchemist. Could I say this day was grand? Or might I consign it to a footnote too long, the last one hundred pages of James Joyce's Ulysses, the Bloomsday celebration forming YES and asking no more yes and the grey dawn gritty on the eyes and yes the soot gone grey and the cold coming he had of it and yes the place where all souls meet sweet and sonorous, limping in, dragging one foot, perturbed and not placated. I look to another day for my succor, I walk without pleasure, unless this chord strikes a love beyond fear.