SMOKE AND MIRRORS (Photo credit: Michael Thurber)
‘Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you’ Friedrich Nietzsche
Unaccustomed to your eyes I returned the gaze
I found myself in apparent delight, a simple lover
lost in a maze, and so I followed what I thought was light
It led me to the depths of night and there I knew my simple plight
The depths within your eyes
In conceit I have fancied myself bride to the night
As though from ancient longings some healing may alight, a fallen angel,
a simple, silken sprite, and so I saw in you the answer to my dream
A twin soul shimmering with such familiar gleam and you dragged me down
into your old, forgotten stream, so terrible and bright
I felt myself inviolate and aloof, from all earthly terrors
somehow the final proof, of the triumph of the will when gazing in the depths
All the sense of warning, the stories we forget, I would ride above them
separate and yet, I’d forgotten you had something here to get
And in gazing back you looked into my heart, without mercy, without truth
So when the time came to really see you true
I was lost in the complexity and bafflement of you, a desperate captive
stricken by my view, and so I gazed within my mirror bright
and from this surface the depths of you alight, and try as I may,
try as I might, I could not escape, could not even start the fight
The poet was right, the poet said it true
In gazing long at darkness I became a part of you
© Helen Valentina 2013 All Rights Reserved
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