Rarely had my vision been focused in the past
and maybe for this reason the passage of time
felt as if it was little more than a forgotten dream.
I often found my eyes on an icy reflection
of a naked man standing before a fogged mirror,
fresh with the haze of a hot shower.
I would gaze upon him and he back into me,
pondering to myself "who are you stranger?"
I could only assume he thought the same of me.
I would wonder when he walked away
from that tooth paste stained portrait
if he ventured into the world with that familiar vigor,
that naive sensibility to battle
the demons,
the contradictors
and the liars.
If he too would laugh at these same fallacies in himself
with a certain kind of madness that could only touch
the ears of the few free men among us.
Those tragic spirits who dared to dance,
to transcend ancient genetics and modern culture
in hopes of touching a god they had long forsaken.
We may have given it a different name
but we were no better then the theologians before us,
we clung to our most primal desire.
It weighed upon us with such force
that hunger,
thirst
or even lust
felt like a pestering annoyance in the shadow of its glory.
Our appetite for connection far surpassed our need
to facilitate our biological deficiencies
and in those moments of understanding we reveled in the irony
of being minds trapped in fleshy bodies.
A smile crept across my face and one grew upon him.
I knew this man who stand before me,
unafraid,
bare in body
with a dastardly grin.
He was my oldest friend,
the ghost who spoke to me
in my most vulnerable moments
when no others did.
He cried for me when I could not,
would not cry for myself.
He had always been there
for me and for the first time
when I turned away from his reflection
I felt him follow too.