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.
