MONDSCHEIN/MOONLIGHT - For L

It’s easy — watching

languid candle flame

warm the milk-wan

body,

midnight hair cascading,

framing

the face that’s haunted

your dreams —

to tell yourself

God has led you here,

His metaphors and signs

garlanding a poppy chain of

            destiny — that

the

dark eyes searching

your own, so close they

            merge,

will always regard you thus —

that morning will never come,

its cares, its quotidian glare —

and lovers

carved

one from the other

never have to

            part.

BLINK

Lethe laps Ophelia’s body

      washed up at its edge;

hubristic combustion illuminates

      then consumes

the stage. Act after act

projected across the glow

fragmentary nightmare reels:

grainy black and white infused

      vivid scarlet.

Tragic:                                                 Absurd:

everybody’s flawed and dies.        Dialogue from different plays

                                                            collides real-time unnoticed.

                                      Farce:

                                      manners, sex, and bursting bubbles

                                      of meaning.

Alone in this omnicameral theatre

Narcissus ponders Hamlet’s question.