if you were to halt me in a street and ask
what defines a mystery? i'd have no trouble
in dropping equivalents, metonyms:
a puzzle, conundrum, crux, enigma,
a commodity beyond human understanding.

but truthfully, impartially, justly
when i muse over the question alone
the webs of instinctual response can be brushed aside
replaced with an inherent yearning.

i seek to know why perfection spawned
so intangible in an age where, like the
illegible scrawl of a faceless war leader,
each detail is immortalised
in a pixel, a photon, a sound wave.

you and i, we're not acquainted in the flesh
but the mystery continues, of how a translation
of your features on a screen can captivate me,
can steal into my heart and run away with my breath.

i would swear of your existence on the stars,
take a cosmic oath.
but how am i to know, with you there and me here?
prove yourself to me, please
to be more than an empyrean deception