1.  Life serves us the most interesting dishes for our guiltless consumption.  Some demented cosmic chef grabs various ingredients from insane and unspeakable sources, slices and dices, chops and grates, mixes and melds it until some crazy hodge-podge which has no name and indeed shall remain nameless is formed.  Well I have tasted life and swallowed its frightening flavors and returned for seconds and thirds, devouring it, reveling in its filthy mess, and rooting in it like the dirty dog that I have become.  I have tasted life’s great culinary experiment and I have not found it wanting.

So why are we here?  Why have I somehow persuaded you into sitting still long enough that I may force feed you the regurgitated remains of this dubious dish?  Are you also a gourmand of this cosmic cuisine?  Have you too, eaten of its cornucopia and fed until you felt full if possibilities, bursting with the fruits of creation that swirl in your gorge, making you sicker than you have ever been in your life, pushing you in turn to vomit out your spiritual guts and look upon the contents of your soul?  Ah, your stomach’s contents are my stomach’s contents and contentment as I seek the deep blue sea that is reflected in the mirror before me.  My reflection haunts me.  It stares at me unendingly without flinching, boring its black eyes deep into the hunger of my soul reflected into the world within the mirror.  It knows of my gluttony.  It knows that I feasted on life and the fruits of other men’s labors, as I searched for a means to penetrate the mystery of the mirror.  It is evident that my greed has marked me; it has tattooed me, tainted me and scarred me with a dark and treacherous ink that bleeds into my soul, etching there the picture of my corruption, the portrait of my passions, and the painting of my lust for life, for love, and the dark energy that bleeds into the blackness of my soul.

The mirror calls to me in my intoxication as I ride the waves of shame and indifference that fill me in a rhythm that matches the beating, pulsing heart of the world that I am chasing within its depths.  Yet it constantly eludes me, this world beyond the world, it taunts me with its incessant invitations and reflected parody of all the things that make me myself.  It hurts me this phenomenon.  Why cry out to me then reject me when I answer the passionate pleas that I see in the dark eyes staring at me from the frosted glass?  I want to smash it, spit on it, scratch it, and punish it for torturing and tormenting me with a hand held out to me with a bloody rose, fragrant as it funereal.  But I have understood the meal that life has served me.  I have taken its lesson to heart and into the secret core that the mirror cannot see, that the mirror cannot touch and taunt me with deadly desire which can only destroy me.  I shiver in anticipation of the promise to be fulfilled in that strange face that confronts me as I beg of it to hear my cries and let me into that world beyond my own.  Perhaps there I could see again, perhaps there I can atone.  But life’s not about atonement is it?  It’s about experience and tasting the many things which are thrown our direction so that we enjoy its goodness, its evil, its delicious array of flavors which can give us such sweetness upon the tongue and bitterness against the eyes.  It sounds too much, this philosophizing about the nature of our existence, but sometimes it is part of being alive to wax poetic, to see the mouth in the petal of the rose, the finger in the drop of rain.  But once again I look to the mirror to tell me what it is that I am seeing in the bud of the flower or the wing of the crow.  Its mystery draws me like iron fillings to a magnet pulling my granulated roughness towards its heart and holding me against my will as close as a lustful lover.  Infinity resides there and pushes out its pulses of creativity touching me like the delicate fingers of a forgotten companion come back to haunt me.  How I missed that touch, how I wish that I could ride those waves back to its source in the depth of my battered other half who stands before me wondering as I do if the possibilities reflected here in this mirror can offset the pain that we both feel in our hunger to be united.  The mirror does not answer me, and I wonder if ever will.  I have tried all sorts of ways to step into that silver world but as entrance still eludes me I feel my sanity is at stake.  But look at me being all melodramatic. If you learn nothing else from my dialogue with the mirror you will learn that we are all melodramatic poets, and that we are all insane.  So look into the mirror, I dare you.  Confront that which resides there always watching you closer than the most possessive of lovers, who for some odd reason rejects you wholeheartedly and violently when you come too close.  I cannot kiss the mirror and hope to make it mine.

So what do you see in the mirror?  Is that the window to your soul, or are your eyes corrupt and hiding the true pathway to you secret core?  I bury myself in what I see there, trying to describe to myself what it is that haunts me so much about the face that I see staring back at me with eyes as haunted and hungry as my own.  When I sleep I hear it whispering to me and in my dreams we touch each other and its ebony skin feels like stone.  There are lessons to be learned in that reflection, there are messages that are waiting to be passed on to this vagabond trying to find his way home.  I must learn to follow the sounds that the world is singing to me as I journey through creation blindly, blundering my way along, crossing secret paths oblivious and deaf to the melodies of Nature’s many rhythms which drum their staccato beats deep upon the taut skin of my intellect and of my soul.

2.  So tell me, what is that mote in the eye of the mirror?  What is that sound of silence reflected from deep within the silver source which claims kinship with the spark that burns in my thoughts?  It is difficult to think sometimes with this fragment of light and heat confusing my mental processes with thoughts of naked pine pines trees running through a desolate vale.  It makes no sense I know; it makes me wonder if all my thoughts have been similarly nonsensical or am I a prophet prophesying in tongues that in my ignorance I cannot understand?  I look deep into the gilded mirror and wonder if I am sane. But what is sanity?  What decides whether the fruits of my mental labors are rotten and born from a poisoned tree?  The world would have us believe that we must all think in circles, clockwise no less, like little mechanisms, fleshy machines following a pretty pattern ordained for us by the Great Watchmaker in the sky.  But Fate cannot manipulate me, for no God can now move me.  I am a diamond mote in the eye of the Creator, whose face I see staring back at me in the dark waters of the mirror, flowing, swirling, swishing and pouring down upon my eyes and cleansing them of their greatest sin. They enjoyed their blindness too much and reveled in their ignorance, not knowing, not realizing that my soul was slowly unraveling and coming apart at the seams, like some ancient tapestry long neglected upon some foreign potentate’s palace walls.
There is much to be said about the powers of silent meditation, to look inside the secret center of one’s spirit and locate a space that is wholly your own.  I have searched all my life for this space; I have searched all my days for that moment when reflected from the mirror within my soul I would see my spirit staring back, golden in its warmth and glory.  But I have not found this restful place and it drives me to go to greater lengths in my search for that perfection, for that peace, for that space where passion is the air you breathe while you swim through its currents like some mighty Asian dragon borne on currents of wisdom and wonder.  But I wax poetic again!  I try to speak but my tears are torn from me in a voice that can only sing its rage and its pain for being without the gift that is proffered by what I see in the mirror. So foolishly I flee it; I fly into a bird, which squirts me out in its liquid droppings; I hide in a flower that rejects me in its fragrant emissions; I rest my soul in a dead man who rises up and spits me out upon the grave where we both once again look upon this cold and barren earth with hooded and decayed eyes so savagely ripped from the grave.  Trembling, I crawl back to the mirror, and look into its depths in the hope that I can somehow find forgiveness for myself and for the others who have cursed themselves with powers gained from the long kisses enhanced by this heretical pain.  Somehow I will redeem myself.  Somehow I will become what only I can see standing before me, proud and strong with strength to spare and love to give.  But is really redemption that I am seeking?  For the mirror has taught me that there is no forgiveness to be found there and it is not a place of atonement.  Yet here I am day after, crying out in my rage into the brittle face in the mirror, begging to be forgiven, and hungering for a kiss to cool my fevered brow.  For such heat is not meant for me; I am a cold person.  Like the dead, there is no feeling within me and no fire burns in my clammy breast.  But did not say that I am arisen?  The dead man awoke and spat me back into the world with eyes wide open and breath taken from the dark underworld of my reflected glory.  In some ways it has made me stronger, more able to adapt and strangely enough more content.  They say that death is a return to the womb and if this is so then I have been reborn, not into the light air of a world full of possibilities, but instead I am reborn black and blue with the pain and passion that has been beaten into me by the silent mocking eyes I see laughing in the mirror.

3.  Whenever time begins to beat its heavy hand upon my weary back and shoulders, I open myself up to the bloody blows and embrace the punishment that it seeks to deliver.  I seek it out at times as a tonic; it refreshes and renews me while allowing me to taste the world more clearly, as the blood begins to flow from the bleeding eyes that stare at me from the hollow world of the mirror.  I learned an important lesson there in that world, where silence rules and mimicry is the greatest form of love which those of us who are still searching can ever hope for.  But sometimes in think I whine too much, for the mirror shown me that the beatings have not marked me nor marred what I have come to think of as my Beauty.  What a word is Beauty!  How many images does it evoke in both the mind’s eye and in the storm’s eye which tumbles and twists around us whenever it raises its head for us to worship with eyes that hunger for a taste of that most elusive of qualities.  But I see it sometimes; I see it reflected in the mirror on days when the Muses sing in my ears and passion’s spark burns in my blood.  Is this my vanity which forces me to acknowledge that I am beautiful?  Or is it the God in me baring His Word to the world in an effort to create and to push the primal urge?  On this day I cannot hope to understand the longing that Beauty causes in my breast though not because I see it in myself or around me, but instead because I taste in my mouth as I speak and hear it in my ears as I scream in ecstasy for the Beauty that see ripped from my spirit and cast into the depths of the soul of the mirror.

I feel rather introspective; my poetry seems bland and tasteless, lacking the essential spices and flavors to enhance its stature in the eyes of my guests who are here to feast upon the rancid meat of my corpse.  Beauty has killed me.  Beauty has corrupted me.  Beauty has cleansed me and while gutting me, kissed me with lips whose touch is deadlier than that voice crying out in shame at the brightness of pain and the final release that it only can give.  Sometimes I see her flying above me in my dreams, soaring on wings made from a latticework of my tears and heat torn from my youthful days so long forgotten.  Once again I turn to the mirror in an effort to plumb its depths for that hidden source which will soothe the heat which threatens to consume me and burn from my very character, from my unlined face, to leave me bald and faceless, eyeless and lipless, shorn of all features so that I am unmade.  I see a manikin, the shadow of a human, a form without function but still pregnant with endless possibilities that can be painted upon this blank template that Beauty’s rage in the mirror has so savagely burned from my aching form.  I am raw now.  I am bloody meat, delicious and rare, waiting to be devoured by the connoisseur who understands and enjoys this sort of meal, so that I can watch her eat as I sit in silence, in Limbo, watching her in the mirror which has changed me.  Without so much as a breath it has breathed upon me a stench, a miasma of foul and fair fragrances designed to pull me in and hold me while it allows my person to be scoured, ripped, raped, tormented and ravaged by all that has come back to haunt me in the mirror.  If only to transform me, the process, as painful as it is, has confused me and confounded me for it has been done with no direction in mind, with no sense of reason and no goal it seems other than to remake me in any image other than my own.  My metamorphoses is like the Uroboros, a serpent eating its own tail until finally it disappears into its own deep maw, a monad, tiny and lonely in its solitary existence on the wide tableau of this beautiful world.

4.  I wonder if I am truly awake.  I wonder if I am not wandering through life as a sleepwalker, stumbling and bumbling my way through the various paths and obstacles that life invariably throws in front of us.    I know that this is not very clever of me and after all the multitude of clichéd phrases, it is a shame that I too, should fall into the same murky waters.  But I am restless.  I am tired of searching for the new and have retreated to the tried and true ideas and ideals which have fed and led mankind throughout the millennium.  It is not a new and unfamiliar face that I see when I look into the mirror; no it is the same flesh only older and more battered perhaps.  But here comes the trick, the hidden science that we are all secretly searching for; the mirror does not show us what we think we see nor does it give us what we hope to hear because in that world beyond our own it too, is changing, evolving and becoming something less itself, less mundane and more us, just as we become in time so much less a mockery of that image we face in the mirror every day and instead grow to become the image, to be reformed as dark twins separated by distance, by time and space who cry out an ancient word:  unification.  The word has died a thousand deaths as our leaders have recycled this idea, this idea of one.  One God, one race, one people, one wife, one husband, one is the golden number, the ideal that we all strive for.  So why does the mirror cry out in defiance with its every mocking smile, its every mimicking motion of my hunger, my drive, my deep desire to unite with myself in the cold depths that I see in its shiny surface?  Much has been written about the power of one and why we must strive to attain it, but after all my trials---by fire, by arms, by ordeal, by knowledge---I have found this ancient idea to be found down a path on which lies a desperate secret, that this is the way to madness.  The universe is one of dualities, so by what right do we try to force our foreign desires upon its perfection?  It is perfect and we are made in its image and so by yearning and striving for unification we spit upon and denigrate the beauty and purity of that which gave us life ad purpose.  The mirror laughs at our presumption and throws us into the path of an incoming juggernaut where our egos and intellect are crushed and contained so that we may cease, in our arrogance, to be tempted to tamper with the Primal Urge as it guides and balances creation with two hands, two eyes, and two lips so that it may touch, see and kiss its creation.
Let us return to duality, this pious state of being in which one being exists within another wholly beautiful and individual in its own essence, contained within a partnership guided by the reflection of creation itself.  Duality is the mirror.   It is the universe in its perfection reflected in our every cell, our every limb so tightly bound within us the way the proton and the neutron reside in our cores.  So what is the mirror that I constantly seek, if not a mimic of that grand creation, aping the concept imprinted upon our DNA and our very breath?  I have learned now what it is that I see in the mirror and it is serenity, but also I have understood that I seeing in its savage depths a love so profound that it has taken a bizarre form in order to resist identification.  It is a fragment of the greatest mirror, creation itself which hides there in the hope that someday I will shed my shackles and drop the veil which shields my eyes from the glory that is hidden in a tiny part of that world weary face that I see in the mirror.

5.  Destiny is a weaver.  In Her hidden wisdom She takes the many threads of our individual lives and weaves them together to create life’s intricate pattern and focused design.  I have long yearned to get closer to its silken strength, its colorful diversity and its ability to cohere in the face of the storm which rages at the door to this house of cards, so quickly constructed without mortar and without the wit to cling to the forms that we are forced to conform to.  Our destiny however, is not predestined by some benevolent being with our best interests in mind; instead our fate is controlled by the reflection of that tapestry which our petty lives weave into the semblance of life.  In seeking out the reflection we give in to the thirst which has roughly driven us into the arms of the mirror that cannot satisfy our parched lips or our empty bellies, for it is a reflection of that which has the substance to give us the nourishment which we need to survive, and to thrive in this crazy world.  It has usurped my eyeballs and constructed, for better or for worse, a mask which fools everyone with its brilliance, its carnival cortege of character.  As always the mirror humors me, never reacting or resisting the tantalizing tales of the sly labyrinth of tainted thoughts which are constantly spun out in mockery and mimicry of that great weaver, Destiny.  Its seduction is simple and oh so sublime as it comes out of this madman’s mouth.  But I have been cleansed of this taint by the presence of the poet/priest that I see leering out at me from the mirror, crying from my cowardice while I cower from its cruelty and the love that comes as quickly and savagely as a brutal contagion.

My simplicity has punished me.  In such a complex society which hates that I loved so deeply, so frivolously, so eternally clumsily cavorting about the wings and killing the question with casual clarity so that it forces me to see the color of my soul.  It is burned into my wicked, wicked forehead.  It relaxes by  curling up in my lap as it kills me softly with it eyes, so piercing that they impale me to the depths of my soul.  So I let it go.  I strive to disprove that in holding on that which is identical, I taste a dream flavored by passionate suns taking hold of me and letting itself go.  It leaves me so alone, more alone than it is imaginable to be alone.  I realize that I am nothing, a nexus of nothingness, a solar spasm, like the premature ejaculation of some cosmic Casanova, horrified at his poor performance.  This impotent sun which cannot even arose itself, tries in vain to ignite the fire that life’s many passions foster within our breasts but find instead the cold ashes of an abandoned hearth.  If only I could give myself to the Great Eye I see in the mirror, the iris which opens and closes in a pattern similar to what Destiny weaves into our hearts, our minds and our souls.  It is a solitude that is never free for I cannot see its vision.  It has glass in its eyes but my hands are clumsy and cannot cleanse it of this debris.

There is no beauty in this bondage to each other, the mirror and I, simply morbid tranquility that dies a little death over and over again, two gorgeous individuals mastering their breath so that they are one individual degraded and dominated by their own proximity to each other’s indestructibility and corruption.  Who can tell now which is the mirror?  I have grown restless from this dark malaise which falls on my shoulders like an old friend’s arms, as she holds me while I weep my frustration to the world.  But she keeps my tears, those refugees of that bitter lake whose depths are hidden deep within my shattered heart, while I spank her rudely on bruised and broken knees, with a twisted benevolence reserved for those who my love has snatched up and branded with my serpentine mark.  It is a testament to not only my lust, but my poverty of spirit and my never ending greed as I watch her drink the bitter liquid and toast the face watching us both in the mirror with savage and hooded eyes.  The duality is a beautiful thing for it has both degraded and delivered me from a destiny woven for me from a thousand eyelashes swimming in a lake of bitter tears.

6.  I am a saint and I am a sinner.  I am an altruist and I am an egoist.  I am alive and unconquered as I hunger for more out of a life that has proven to be inconsequential and incomplete.  No statues have been erected in my honor; no wise words have been etched on stone monuments as testaments to brilliance, my foresight in clearing the way for the world to see the light that shines from deep within the mirror.  It is painful you know, both the light that now cuts me and the knowledge that has rendered me invisible to the world that I seek to impress.  I am hungry and alone.  I am naked and driven by a rising wind that blows through the windows of my soul.  They are empty, these doors of my perception, my eyes had seen the glory of a splendid opera whose actors were picked from a never ending cosmic cast of characters plucked from the many pantheons that I see dancing in the mirror.  They mock me you know; they laugh and spit at me while I contemplate the possibilities that the mirror has awakened in me, possibilities that in my blindness I cannot see and that my own screams prevent me from hearing.

I am drowning in sea of illusion, cast by the warped shaped of the mirror which in its wisdom is a changeling, a metamorph whose shape is liquid of and unchained like the intellect before my fleshy masters, romping and raving like dispossessed prophets hoping to retrieve my lost talent of prophecy.  But the future holds no secrets so I let it be; it will kill me and devour my eyes with a tongue that is made of my past.  I cannot hope to win against it, but if I was to open my mouth and breathe upon it, perhaps for a moment that one blessed moment, when it is cloudy, frosted with the tang of my breath I could see inside the walls that hold the secrets of my birth and wrench from them at least a few concessions and perhaps a little rest.  But I am tired, tired of hoping for a moment in time when what I see in the silence of my breath will release me as surely as a jilted lover with eyes burning with a lust insatiate and unconsummated will spill his seed in some dark corner alone.  It breaks me, this temptation to cling to the silvery walls of the mirror and in my desperate rush to hide from its burning eyes I have a vision of dragons flying carefully around me as if I was some dangerous beast deadly and bold.  There is a lesson here, but I just cannot seem find it, though perhaps if I continue to look at the sound of my name as it bangs its way through existence, I may one day find a moment in time raised in honor of my name and etched on creation’s great walls where lies the true soul of the face I see in the mirror.

7.  I entered with woe; with mirth.  Laughing suddenly as I am forced to kneel and pray, shivering in anticipation of the mirror’s judgment and scorn for my wide eyed reaction to its uncharacteristic revelation.  The mirror neither shows me what I want to see nor tells me what I would like to hear; instead it speaks in toneless hieroglyphics with glowing letters primed to burn a lesson upon my pockmarked and desolate soul.  So why show me a bleeding breast so reminiscent of Christian mythology and the dogma of a million rapacious crusaders ripe to ravage the Constantinople of my secret center, where lies all my riches and my treasures so cleverly kept from the prying eyes of the hungry mob and curious fingers of the seductress rummaging through my cabinets and closets at her leisure, after a night of passion, while I lay spent dozing, deeply and contented in the arms of a powerful dream?  But I am not without my own mythology which has nourished and sustained me through the spiritual drought that the mirror’s vision has revealed to me, as it lies like some devious blanket, plotting and planning to draw the life out of the world with its woolen arms and fibrous fingers which cannot hope to find purchase in my soul.  I am nursed by a dragon with seven teats, each one dribbling milk for my consumption and transportation far from this bald realm that cannot keep itself warm without hair.  I am tired of it, this greedy landlord whose avaricious grin I see leering at me from a sin marked face as it reaches out to me from the mirror and tries to grab my eyes.  But it cannot succeed, for I am full of the milk of sadness and my liquid eyes can only weep and evade its wicked fingers which never really passed the threshold of the mirror, though the illusion was real and as deadly as the touch itself.  But enough!  Must I always speak in tongues?  The time has come for plain words and unadorned letters as I attempt to formulate a way to force open my eyes to see the beauty that lives before me, not hidden as previously believed, but openly revealed as the sound of a thousand whispers dropped from lips caressed by purple butterflies.  But even though my eyes were put out, my nose cut off, and my tongue split, I can still philosophize about my ungodly Muse, which lies sometimes in the icy depths of the mirror.  It is for her that I force out these words into a frigid world, to watch them, erupt, steaming and bloody into the gaping maw of a demonic preacher and devoured with a precision that belies his twisted form.

I wonder if there is a place where I can sit quickly and comfortably and paint a perfect picture of the harmony that I see in the reflected wisdom of the mirror but I am sure that it is in vain that I toss and turn in the little naps that I take, the short intermissions from the tortures that life has given me.  But I am not so filled with sadness and regret as I like to speak of, I simply choose to evoke these sentiments from which I pull out the heartbreak, the pain and the tender sentiments which have so bruised and battered me, kneading me like some insane baker who pummels me and then allows me to rise before placing me into the inferno that life’s challenges will create.  I am not afraid of it, this worthless sensation of self-contemplation of the figure which always trails me in the mirror in the air that swirls in my lungs and the spittle that is flung at me by the jeering crowd which comes to see me.  Like a rising God, I am executed before their eyes, scourged, crucified and unceremoniously dumped in a cold, cold grave without carvings and a witty epitaph to mark its passing.  But as the door to my tomb closes, and I open one eye to look at the disappearing light I wonder, is this my mouth or have angels come to rip out my tongue for the blasphemies that my words have reflected back from the mirror and have thrown upon the world?

8.  Life can be panorama of subtle jewels worthy of reflection within the multitudes of facets in which I see myself recreated a dozen times.  It is like looking into the eyes of a fly where I am compounded and increased infinitely until I can no longer see which is my face and which is the hope that is held in abeyance by the powers of the mirror.  But it is another day and sunlight is streaming through the windows of my soul, awakening me to the possibilities so lightly etched in bronze.  I struggle to awake; the sleeper must awaken.  I battle the little imps who hold down my consciousness and rip free of their bonds and wade into some infernal battle scene now that their tiny ropes have been broken.  But the imps are still around me chattering like spider monkeys enraged that a great ape has stolen their fruit.  So what can I do to change what life’s gem shows me in my reflection?  It is a mirror of a different sort, multifaceted, complicated, and constantly changing in its colors and its form.   I can see through this mirror and it scares me.  I am transfixed as it reaches out to realms which are unknown to my eyes and evokes dark images in my senses that can only drive me to greater depths of depravity and debauchery as I learn repressed things about myself.  The song that I must sing to center myself on pathway to the Godhead has been revealed to me and at the same time stolen from me, as it always seems to be.  How long must I rave in torment as I search for the hidden key that will open and unveil the markers which can lead me back home?  I shall decide my own resting place and it shall be a dark, dank place where humanity pantomimes the delicate dance imagination does in its nightly communion with that most ancient of entities called Night.  Night robs us of our memories, filling us with nourishment made of dreams and the desires we see made flesh, as we examine carefully our reflection in the mirror, the same mirror that haunts and rejects me, bouncing back everything with no recourse and no remorse.  I feel the jagged shards of its brittle existence cutting into my will to push forward in this great adventure that we call life.  But is this enough for me I wonder, this hope that I see, that I yearn for, and this desperate desire that I pray may come to pass in the argent surface of the mirror and allow me to sink into its depths, my eyes harpooned by the silver sighs that echo within its walls?  Such questions are the guideposts to madness.
As a madman I have often sprouted the horns of a Satyr and approached life with lust and a spurting member, intent on fertilizing the earth with which I am pregnant and gravid, screaming as the labor pains push and pulse and throb, ejecting this child of possibilities into the light and air of a blasted wilderness.  I watch it crawling, then walking, and then running, my, my quick such a learner, it must soon be upon me with its alien hungers and uterine stench.  It runs with the afterbirth dragging behind it, raining upon the black earth pieces of its nourishment, to nourish and navigate its path until it finds way home to me and the reflection that it can see in my eyes though I squeeze my eyes shut to hide from the sight of it.  This is my child of possibilities and the dream of chocolate covered kisses, delivered by my own mouth and the words that can only embrace the dream that resides in the many colored facets of the mirror.

9.  No one knows where silence ends and sound begins; perhaps it goes on forever.  We live our petty lives forever skirting the edge of its precipice, blind and deaf to the possibilities that it holds for us with a gaping maw filled with dead poets and blind philosophers.  This silence is not a pure thing, nor is it a ghostly emptiness, beautiful in its hopeless hunger for a note from a song.  I know this silence; I know it intimately, like a comfortable lover whose caress has carried me carefully on wings of muted notes, which wait for that silence to swallow them whole.  The mirror knows this silence.  The mirror knows this throatless cry in the wilderness that screams away its fingers and voice so that it cannot play the piano or sing an aria, leaving a clarity of thought that is in reality a shroud of mental retardation, pushing me to force my face closer and closer to the mirror.  It is however, a magnificent thing, a structure of blown glass, delicate and brittle, but beautiful and bold, a promise of things to come when my eyes are torn bloody and raw from their sockets, sucked from my skull and pulled into the flowing emptiness of this subtle river.  But my presence in this flow is strange in itself, eyeless as I am.  Though I now have no sight, and no desire to see, I lower myself into this strange liquid and find that the water is clear and energizing, all warmth and transcendence bubbling up from the subterranean caverns I sense beneath my webbed toes.  What?  Am I now amphibious, taking to the water like a salamander, tasting it from its source in the mirror’s heart?  I sense the great vessels that deliver this fearsome water into my blank sockets eyes, granting me a blazing vision.
I calmly watch the spear tips that announce the arrival of the bloody horde come to scour the surface of this wasteland to its bare bones and suck its marrow dry.  I remain, as always, yearning and wondering if one of those steel tipped wanderers will find its way home deep within the bowels of my morose body and ignite a fire in my gut.  I wish to drink beer and belch flames; to build a hearth of fire bricks in between my teeth and with the remains of the day I would feed such a fire as has never made heat before and forge an alliance with my tongue so that I will speak steel words to cut the masses and draw from them the blood that will nourish my thoughts and my lips which already form the Word.  But I am a weak creature who temptation will always find waiting with arms outstretched expecting to be rewarded for my curiosity and my greedy eyes which were so righteously ripped from my head and fed to the lips that I try to kiss as I dance before the mirror.  I see them boiled and bloodied as if someone had cooked them like three minutes eggs, my eyes dancing before me in a demonic step dance designed to entrance and enhance me into flowing forward and grasping them form the mirror.  It is enough that they are denied me; now they would mock, batting aside my hopeful hands while staring at me with a loathing unseen in disembodied eyes dancing like live crabs in a smoking pot.  But enough!  I am blind.  I am unmovable for my lack of sight has given me the power to emulate the rock and the steel that feed our machines as I wonder if I swallow enough dust and death, will I be able to bluff my way deep into the world denied me in the bloody depths of the mirror.

10.  Between the flashes of light and darkness I have caught glimpses of the horror that I sometimes feel infesting me from my toes to my crown.  It rises as water rises within a tree, from the root to its leaves and moves stealthily into my hidden places, happy to have been revealed in the fleshy tomb that holds the ghost of my forgotten past.  It used to scare me this creeping rot that feels so comfortable wandering through my secret spaces, but now as I contemplate ideas alien to me, I wonder if it has not always been a part of me.  These reflections of me in these places are reflections which bounce back and strike me on my cheeks, rebuking me for forgetting to greet the curious creature which I see observing me in the mirror.  Why can’t it bow its head and pray for me, that I may undo the damage I have done to the fabric of my soul with my decadence and debauchery, the destruction of a delicate part of me which should never have been revealed to the world and its penchant for corruption.  But I am not one to be filled with self-pity; my bones are too old.  Yet what I see floating in the mirror sometimes scares me into a silence deeper than the most profound thought.
Calmly, oh so calmly do I gesture to the messengers which exist in the darkened corners of the mirror and indicate that I am ready to see what lies hidden behind bronze gates that will soon gape with a different kind of message for my eyes to see.  I am a wanderer whose soul is lost, and driven forth by life’s despair I eat what is tossed my way, pushed and prodded beyond any care and gobbling these disgusting morsels that lie in my path.  I try to savor the things that make life still, such as a scented flower or a blade of grass heroically pushing its weary body through the dark confines of the black earth.  But the ways of memory are never bright and as I squint to see what lies beneath I ask myself what the mirror hides from me, though I chase its secrets as surely as any gossip, exhausting myself in this deadly trek.  Slowly I have come to realize that the air around me has stolen so much of my breath that there can be no secrets left in me as it carries them from me with each exhalation to all the corners of the world from which I have tried so desperately to hide my true self.  I wonder if my neighbors see me for the demented poet that I am really am.  But since when have I cared what my neighbors think?  The mirror is my muse and it inspires me to feel aloof and apathetic, dismissive of the world that resolves on axis that is not part of the world that lies within the mirror.  It is a discourse on sentiments divided by a harsh and cutting bark emitted by myself as I ape the dog that I see staring at me with chastened eyes from the depths of the mirror.

11.  There is a madness that comes upon me sometime, affixing me with idiotic appendages and seizes me with philosophical intent.  Curiously, it does not seek to harm me but instead it proceeds to explore and examine me carefully as if hoping to find the entrance to some subterranean vault which may hide the secret of my sanity.  As I strain to look deeply into the vortex that life’s dizzying gymnastics have summoned, I feel an unreasoning terror that somewhere in its depths there lies a grotesque and gargantuan eyeball staring back at me with a grim curiosity and disdain at my insolence at having dared to divert its attention from its glorious contemplations of the cosmic drama unfolding before its sweeping gaze.  I must tread carefully here, for the mirror in its spite and loathing of my weakness and human frailties has woken the many cyclopean judgments that have been passed against me for my various transgressions, which I refuse to acknowledge in their courts of bald faces and ageless voices.  So I attempt to rise above it.  I try my best to leave this lackluster tapestry of woven lies and deceptions firmly on the shoulders of all those who would see the monstrous eye put its gaze upon and reduce my soaring spirit to a chattering insect whose only moment of glory is when it immolates itself in the flame that so draws its gaze.  I have found that the most fragrant incense has always been the spicy smell of death and so I salute those who hold the secret to understanding the melody that I hear torturing me as I gnash my teeth and stamp my feet in an effort to tame the wildness that I smell coming from the mirror.  Perhaps they can tell me why it never ceases to play.
I feel its drowsy lips upon mine when I come too close and it kisses my purple lips, ripe and succulent with bubonic formations of phonemes that punish the mouth that attempts to pronounce them.  It is not a subtle thing, this knowledge that I have gleaned from my dialogues with the mirror, nor is it a healthy obsession this gazing into infinity without so much as a tentative step into the wide space that contains the only sensations that I care to experience upon my bare and thirsty skin.  It is a silly, sad story that has to end, if only because its sanity has become exposed to the vagaries of the English language.  I have grown wise with its teaching; I have learned carefully to shun the golden nuggets of spherical madness that it lays before my path as I struggle mightily to fight my way back to the sticky embrace of the mirror.  Watching my bizarre motions, that merry mimic in the shiny glass contemplates me and the pathway to destroying me so that I can pick up the pieces of me and fling them at the sentinel who watches me in the mirror with open arms, ready to embrace the offal that I hurl in its hungry face.  But it does not flinch.  Instead it takes my shattered image and devours it steadily, feeding the broken pieces to the face that has revealed its raven head in the mirror.