If there had been a child of many masks
What does it benefit the one who asks–
Who knows can only go below,
Throw light on wretched memories and facts.

Campaign in retrospective's foggy glow,
The phantom of frontiers from long ago;
More real than feeling, weal congealed,
Mishealed within the skeleton of woe.

The foolishness such questions would reveal,
The state of children's bigotry and zeal:
Half-crafted drafts and laughing gaffes,
Embarrassments that we should like to seal.

Developmental moments or just chaff?
The early life's pubescent cryptograph;
A touching crutch from such-and-such.
One plays themself up, others get the shaft.

What's left to be remembered? nothing much.
More silent moments than some words to clutch.
The notes composed by those who most
Enthrall, the details are their finest touch.

Experience is chance, the fickle ghost;
Experience's chance, discovered coast
Besought in motley water thoughts,
Is not attainable through life-by-post.

A poignant nugget of advice to jot,
Or poetry gestative moments wrought;
The dread that said its head had bled
And bled and bled and what it meant knew not.

Perhaps an early word of sulfur fed
The terrors of damnation. Slyly spread
Repugnance under sums undone;
It sets in that one needs their daily bread.

The secret parts of him that he would shun;
Persona plastic, hatred of the son.
To wait, depatriated. Hate.
Each part of being inwardly debunked.

In fear and ignorance to simulate
A human shell, an empty mirror plate,
The swell of hell, compelled by spell.
His own hand makes his life degenerate.

No self-discovery, no sense rebels
From the negation deep inside unquelled.
Big swindle pins a sin within,
By each deceit without is paralleled.

The deadened soul that hoists the hollow grin,
Unmeaning symbol on his chubby chin–
Beset by wretched nets, regret,
Confused and choking in the world of skin.

Whose crime against himself does he abet?
Each contact thrust-omits the silent threat.
He breathes beneath the lead he sees,
He stands alone now on the parapet.

He grows aware of only entropy;
He bears his spiritual atrophy:
An aging cage. No stage assuaged
The fear of existential enemies. 

Afraid his nature is a broken gauge,
He hid his need for love and disengaged.
A door of scorn and horror formed,
Left him repressed upon an unknown page.

He'll never have the love he's looking for
And waits for death upon tradition's shore.
Life clothes the rose then folds it closed;
He waits for this expecting nothing more.

These emptied intimations he disclosed
To none–himself included–he proposed
No clear sincere appearance. Queer
And in denial, ain't that how it goes.

He failed to know himself for many years
While Love that daren't name itself drew near
He shied aside to hide, denied
The precious resources of youth so dear.

Though long in unawareness he had cried,
Perhaps some sudden day he could abide
His only soul and wholly grow
Into himself where once he hadn't tried.

My life's become an echoplex,
I'm struggling in most respects;
And everything feels so repetitive
While nothing near me here corrects.

My life's become appetitive,
And sweet addiction's sedative
I pine for more in spiraling descent
These days with nothing else to give.

So wastefully my time is spent.
So why do I accept, content
Or somehow otherwise am paralyzed 
While life goes by without consent?

The morning yesterday despised,
In fog and smoke once more reprised,
Conducts my life to labor and ennui;
I smoke, I work, no one's surprised. 

What does it mean, our being free;
Or living self-sufficiently?
A resource-craze has birthed the paradox
Of grinding daily just to be.

The schedule for tomorrow knocks
Upon the door and clicks the locks;
And in the space I have between the shifts,
My idle time reclines and mocks.

Financial obligation lifts
My skeleton; my spirit drifts
Away entangled in monotony,
In social and in corporate grifts.

Restricted in autonomy
And living a disharmony 
Of thin-stretched hours of work and love to meet
Necessity: economy.

It's not as if I lack conceit;
The dream exists, but factors eat
Into my time and leave no energy
Beyond them that I may deplete. 

I feel the pain of urgency
But not its prodding synergy.
I grind my life down only to subsist,
Not further any strategy.

And even if I should persist
With grasping hand or flicking wrist,
Don't I maneuver vainly in this way
Of tracing paths to windows missed?

Am I improving from this play?
But if there's nothing I can say,
What image can I conjure but of ash
And dreams primordial as clay?

Am I the sophomoric splash
That flattens out beyond the flash
Of an initial ripple that could hold
Some promise past its passion's crash?

Am I the song that grows so old,
Whose scant dimensions have been told?
What differentiates or gives me worth,
Or would should I not feebly fold?

***

It's true that I accept a dearth
Yet still expect a holy birth 
Of romance from a hidden chrysalis
To somehow blossom for my mirth.

Perhaps I am duplicitous
To think my love is not amiss, 
To think that he could give me what I want
Beyond a cure to loneliness. 

I am deserving of the taunt
Of his desires, and how they daunt
Me in a mirror image of my own–
The masculinity that haunts.

The femininity that's sewn
Into my being has postponed 
It all, and his ensures I'll ever yearn
To hear the penetrating moan.

But the affection he returns
Becomes enough; the ember burns,
And while I breathe I cannot let it die.
It's his to nurture or adjourn.

Suspended in his seeing eye,
I languish in the need for lye,
For turpentine, an absolution's cleanse
That for my faults may rectify.

The world is in my dirty lens
And cricking cracks its backwards bends
In the reflection that we give ourselves–
Projecting, meeting means not ends.

What wisdom follows folly's delves
To meet the self-fulfilling hells,
The products of our gray proclivities,
The frightful turn of number twelve?

Unique our sensitivities
That on us in our weakness seize
Like physics' limits, nature's prophecy,
Those subtle, secret properties.

I can't explain the mental key
That lies beyond the frothing sea
Of stimulation and analysis;
I'm ignorant as poppy seeds.

But now as deuteragonist
Of our shared lives, paralysis,
My former comfort, echoes in his ear
The stasis of his lone abyss.

How is it I can interfere?
A voice from outer atmosphere, 
The wind-tossed poet on the utter fringe
Whose vision isn't very clear.

My airy words, could they impinge?
Do those with dreams like his astringe?
Assuredly. Question's how to bridge the gap
That gives his life its hopeless tinge.

When we awaken from this nap,
At last allow our wings to flap,
What form will be revealed the clarion–
A murmur or a thunderclap?