“I Dare Not Let You Meet Me”

I gaze into the unkind mirror,

Pausing in my dimly lit passage

In an attempt to verify the image I imagined was there,

The shifting chips of brilliant colored glass resisting,

Revealing to me nothing;

I am still an illegitimate child

Spawned between the night and the dawn and the evening air,

One who can bellow an apocalyptic roar

In numerous dead languages

That strike sounds of bewilderment

Which issue forth caves of bats

Who's echoing screeches

Ring deep from beneath two contorted gargoyles-

One from the marbled future and the one from the granite past

Embedded in the empty catacombs of my melancholy mind,

Their edge split by the tattered strands

Of my razor-sharp hair,

It's presence ever following quietly behind

In the bent hallways of memory

And leading me into doom;

So I tread over the broken shards of my existence.

There is an aspect pleasing to the eye

Shimmering around the silhouette that I perceive is there

But isn't; thoroughly perplexing,

It fascinates completely-

Faintly suggesting the spear-tipped weapons of my doomed hands

And the smooth-glassy skin unreflected,

The light-brownish gray colors

Exceeding all others in quality.

I scrutinize myself incuriously but hospitably,

In an idle, decadent search for an aspect

To take a grand but macabre delight in,

Washing the confines of my body

With the chill of the night, my ally and friend;

My spirit wrapped in herbs, potions, roots, and insects

Then basted slowly over hot volcanic rock

With the musty incense from a cobwebbed pouch

Carried for such an occasion,

And medieval oils stored in bottles blown in devilish fires

By the willing demons of hell,

The slowly rising vapors suspended, arms outstretching,

Mimicking the ornate carvings in the winding castle walls

Of the forboding entrances of my towers

Which continually shift the shadows of their forgotten stories;

My reflection woven in ornate tapestries among them,

Stitched from an ancient royalty

And sewn with its decomposed ruin,

Rippled with vain and tortured searches for being within the folds

Of the dim lights of the world long ago,

Now a confusion of bright hews,

Now the foundation of shadows,

Now destructively violent,

Now as soft as an edible yet slowly poisonous fruit

That lures me back into the mystic ether of the red sky.

Roused into action

By unnatural phenomena

I’m inclined to drink

Every 200 years,

Having a kind of nervous disorder

Not unlike the basilisk

That keeps me amused

Inside my coffin

During the dull confines of my keep.

On my nocturnal flights

I mull the long-suffering losses of loved ones,

And summon up my animal-like hostilities

And long putrefied belligerence,

Restless with condemned intensity,

Yet blowing with extreme bliss

That swiftly slips through the grasp of the darkening trees

And curls among the cloudy trails

That drape in long raiment

The entropy of the imperceptibly-slowing moon

While my appetite forever grows.

I cherish my enchanted mournful happiness

Through the eternal fleeting moments

While intoxicated with an energetic weariness,

I lament the passing stillness of time

And throb with a forlorn animated death

Entwined with a wretchedly illuminated darkness

Pulsating with a vile grace

Entangled in a devious contrived reality

Of beguiling insolent kindness

While I search masterfully yet primitively

For my next thirstless drink.

Yes,

I dare not let you meet me.

wbiro

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