Betwixt the episodes of dull exhaustion,
Between the gleaming shards of an imaginary life,
Beneath the spiderwebbed mirror of memory,
Before each dream cut like naked glass
Befallen from the gloaming of the underworld,
Beyond the glimmering cavern of illusion,
Bespoken by legion tongues of daemons
Belongs this poisoned curse,
I still believe,
In the one,
In the two,
In the ten thousand glittering things,
Beholden only to the frame
Of its shattered existence.
© 2024 Edward P. Morgan III
This one began with each of the starting words of the lines. I’m not sure why but something in their Old English origins is fascinating. Particularly betwixt and between having the meaning of neither one thing nor another.
ReplyDeleteIt took a little while to settle on the theme of shattered, which came to me along with the first two lines in the middle of the night after telling my wife that’s how I’ve felt recently.
The one, the two, and the ten thousand is a Taoist concept. The one is the Tao which runs through and unifies everything. People divide it into two, or Yin and Yang (the classic symbol), whose separateness then shatters into the ten thousand things. Which is to say each individual thing in the world, losing sight of the original unity of Tao.
There also is a through-the-looking-glass line of things falling up, which was purposeful.
Picture Notes:
ReplyDeleteThe idea for the image was Edward’s, based on a mirror I have that sits on my desk. Rather than try to take a picture of the mirror, I created the frame as an oval and used a bevel effect to give it a three dimensional look. There is a wood grain image, called a bitmap, overlaid on the frame to give a realistic look. The idea to put a Yin Yang symbol in the mirror was mine. I patterned the “break” in the glass after designs for broken glass I found online, using the divide tool in Affinity to break up the symbol, then moved the pieces apart a little. Next, I added some gradients to the background and mirror, plus shadows, to give it a more real world look and feel.
Love it!
ReplyDelete