(The eternal self.)  

I.

I met six of us, familiar faces, fellow travelers,
Whose lives sifted through my own, riding channels
Heard faintly from a great distance, bombarding mine,
Now breaking through clearly into full reflection.

I dwell in the possible, exhausted, and now gladly succumb.
My information madness cracks inward, my shell is savaged,
The womb of memory is punctured, and I am naked.
Nothing is impossible, everything is real, to the dreamer.

One: the weeping willow, with the eyes of an innocent,
And white breasts naked above the flimsy silk, sea green.
Otherwise unadorned, perfectly beautiful, her simplistic heart,
Which has never known harshness in any form.

Two: the frozen prince, head bowed in prayer, a mournful cry
In a voice long drowned in absence. The real bleeds through
The artificial – the flaxen hair and jeweled eyes, charming youth,
Will avail you nothing, only treachery against yourself.

Three: the supplicant, devout to formless memory, a beauty,
Who now goes clad in scarlet, the white soaked through with blood.
The fallen feathers and splintered bone, an ecstasy of perversion,
Which communicates a longing unintelligible in our language.