Act 1 Standing near glass, one is never alone, The room is always crowded An inanimate audience, rapt, Starved for words as water in the desert. They are quite fashionably dressed. Fashionably late to the lisztomanic social hour Entertaining Pan, Eros, and Aphrodite So to catch the eyes of some Rebel of the heart; Ah, but who could take their eyes Off the face of world-hope and earthly pain? Deep and Endless as he rides the soft, pink waves Of love from strangers infinite and faceless, There we see Alpha and Omega Cruelty in his perfect Travis Bickle impression: “You talkin’ to me? You talkin’...to me?”
Act 2 With dumb admiration, they all look back, Whispering like gospel, praise and fear alike. A show was one to give, and so it was given, But the silence is deafening-- So, this fourth wall fails us, The veil of envious telepathies Cast locks of hair errant and Eye with nocturnal shadow-- Disassembly spiders like ice from water And all in the foreground fades Washed out by limerant lights Wasting outward tithes That, within or without, we are blind Lest that slowly shattering negative-space Converts, excites, and tosses us back To the depreciating eye and its yawning folds Outside the mirror’s window The implicit volley from another world Those faraway pastures of greener plane.
Act 3 There, there I know the judgements of distant onlookers Are but the prodigal son of fear and desire But knowledge-of and feeling-toward are two faces Of no glass possible to modern physics, And yet, though I’m the spectacle They can see what little part of the world I cannot.