There was once a man who fell in love
with his own shadow. On a gloomy day,
along the pebbles-paved streets swept by
the sooty drizzle of Victorian London,
a clattering of hooves announced the fast
approaching of a horse-drawn carriage,
with at its reins a man in a black coat
and top hat turning back on the way to
the entrance of the graveyard he had crossed
after he had presided o’er his burial.
There, waiting by the sombre iron gate,
he found a woman with blonde hair
and a black cloth that sheathed her sockets
on which two eyes were drawn with chalk;
she raised her arms to him as he was passing,
and the man had a vision of himself
being thrown down in a freshly dug-up grave
while shovelled dirt was heaping over him,
with the moist scents of the night-dewed soil
imbuing its soft texture on his lips
pressed by the tasting of the woman’s kiss,
whom, as he sluggishly awoke from dreaming,
he found gone, with only the resulting pain
of an unearned oblivion being real.
the man rode far and wide across all continents,
where to release his body from the cancer
of the vain recollection gnawing him inside,
he tracked relentlessly the men who were
his other selves– the independent sapplings
grown out of his existence, from the sprouting
of a desire for flourishing in the blind will
that had to serve the freeing of one’s fears–
to ascertain that they would meet
their ending at the bottom of a grave.
Punctiliously, the man always stood waiting
besides the gate of the selected graveyard
where a culled version of himself laid buried,
excited to collect his longed-for recompense
through the soft lips of the blonde woman
who never failed to manifest herself
after he’d homaged her with his grim undertaking,
without ever letting out a sigh or sign
betraying feelings under her black blindfold,
even as he knew that his emotions were
a clear reflection sparkled bright by hers,
before the throes of his consuming passion
inevitably achieved its culmination in the
revealing form of her continuous vanishing.
As the years passed, the man went on
rejoicing at the meaning he preserved
by working tirelessly to seek a blessing
that granted him a dear distraction
from the judging of his failures.
But soon his travels grew more tiresome,
the stretches of the land he had to cover
more and more arduous to surmount.
Until one day, he caught his image in the window
of his forever loyal horse-drawn carriage,
in which he saw the same decrepit face
flapped by the sapping pale skin wrinkled
around the eyes lost in dark hollow sockets,
with brittled hairs of a grey withered gossamer
spun from the top hat to be crumbled into dust,
of all the men he’d ushered to their rest,
and paused, filled by the sudden terror
that welled from knowing of a final kiss
that he would not be there to have.

– Anonhimoose