Strange Dancers pt. 2

2. Mirage

And yet we are little more denuded than before

By eyes on us upon our shamelessness 

Glittering eyes emerging amid stones and scrub

Surrounding us a shrieking Mirage dark like night

It as as being throttled by space

   Look, you

A many-faced Mirage that is as many-voiced

Enveiled and piercing the quarry walls with a treble wail

   You vilify yourselves

   You in your ample prostrations 

   Your mere body 

   This is repugnance

   Entertained at the expense of 

   That of which we cannot speak but with peace upon it 

   How you ignore and defile our creed

   How you affront goodness on these

   Our shores 

   Where is your shame 

Night-veiled Mirage sweeping towards us 

We are rooted still in the ocean’s advance

It punctures the dull contiguity of day-sky

The Mirage waves its many arms more terrible than 

Sexless Kali of nightmares Its arms winged with ten thousand fingers

To root out and excise our essential nudity

To clothe us by stripping further still than those rays of the sun unsheathed

Whose fires penetrate a thousand thousands

Of vast absences layered between us, we and Mirage 

Such distance It imagines It can surpass to

Excise agency and unselfconsciousness

And yet the sun, that fissile orb

Does not ignore the cloth of Its uniform righteousness 

It too festers beneath the blinding prism

Waters lap at our toes, we trespassers rooted in contested waters

Lazy like one made mindless before an incomprehensible disaster

Voices within the Mirage no longer speak in harmony

For the first time Its interior faces regard one another with wonder

It regards Itself for the first time and rippling through those faces

Is sheer wonder and terror as that which once was indivisible recognizes

The agents of its schizophrenia.

For the moment our flesh holds fast

For the moment each of us holds fast 

Freckled in our infinite imperfections before the 

Rarifying veil, the fractal cloth of the faces inhabiting the Mirage

Those nuclear rays spot the Mirage’s cloth with white ash

And for a time we are, my lambic-drunk friends and I

At an impasse as the extinct and fossilized

Vegetation springs upwards from our shadows which like water

Our fissile umbra a shade of darkness enlivening stony ferns

Our shade separating Earth and hallucinations of the heavens

This is our unity.

The Mirage reels as though drunk as our shade

Strikes and divides the world

Black and many-limbed and in motive advance Itself caught 

In our fissile shade we inherit from our lysing star overhead

The Mirage reels. 

Glittering watchers gather like wave-swept agates on the ridge

Pebble-skinned monitor lizards an arm’s length are only juveniles

Their scales are sapphire and opal and eyes like polished jet

Among the fluctuating foliage which returns to its ancient fullness

We seek no shelter behind it

And despite the intensity of the sun and skyfire 

Fossils rejuvenate and turn from stony grey to verdant emerald 

They encircle us on this contested shore

The Mirage and us, we four

We are naked as we begin our counterstep.