Cracked Reality
Cracked Reality
by Brikenor
A pale light creeping into our dark cave,
Shadows bending from one wall to the next.
Reality flows in wave after wave,
From truths inscribed within the Holy Texts.
The candles are lit,
The candlelight fades.
Standing outside, viewing ourselves within,
Unrecognizable to each other—
Only mirages of desert-sand jinn,
Interceded by our Holy Mother.
Her loving embrace,
His kiss of death.
In dreams swirling around my sleeping mind,
Visions of mirrors, cracked, then veiled in fog.
Shifting in and out of temporal time,
A future whispering in analog.
The freedom of choice,
Predetermined fates.
Nestled between the beginning and end—
The Understudy,
Life’s middle child,
Searches the theater for a lost meaning,
Hidden—a forgotten scene, Second Act.
The words are empty,
Meaningless words.
Heroic legends stood the world astride,
Artemis without her bow and arrow,
Carved in marble for museums to hide,
The ancient myths turned the poet’s sorrow.
Odysseus’ blinding spear,
Paris’ deadly aim.
Prism separated by the rainbow,
Returned to primary colors, intact.
Pale light glancing off the cursèd mirror,
Reflected in the viewers’ eyes—refracts.
Cracks in the mirror,
The mirror is cracked.
How are the colors going to get back?
Shrouded in fog; our senses are attacked.
The smoke and mirrors on the serpent’s tongue—
Blood and sand,
Bread and circuses—
Distract.
There is no escape,
The Untiable knot.
The rainbow folds back into the prism,
Beyond which the world is consumed by black.
Dim colors return from kaleidoscope,
To a bleak realm where even hope’s attacked.
Looping in circles,
It begins anew.
Trying to escape from this cursèd ground,
A broken promise they could not retract.
Those bright colors that once shouted their pride
Are now gaslit by a blazing contract.
Praying to the light,
Truth consumed by the dark.
Here, where the Oracle foretells the past,
Lost prophecy fades to the zodiac.
In the penumbra between right and wrong
Exists the place where reality cracked.
