Ten years from now,
you’ll look the same,
You’ll look in the mirror
and say, "hey, I know you."
You’ll point at yourself and
you’ll point right back.
You’ll be pleased with that
and you’ll sail out of the house
convinced
of your uncommon nature.
"Haven’t I proven my fame
by being able to recognize myself, again and again?" you’ll say.
"All that self-destructive
feeding and drinking, all that
lax attention to the body —
good to know I am still myself."
In the second you die,
another ten years on, you’ll think of that
when the pang hits your heart, when your ass
refuses to lift from the couch no matter how hard
you will it to rise. You’ll recall
that there are stories of vampires
who look ruddy and fresh
for years after apparent death.
"Who was that liar
who looked back at me that day in the mirror
ten years ago?" you’ll ask yourself with a Gothic blink
right before you forget you ever existed. "Was that
some already undead notion, some spectre
that represented an unwitting corpse?"
You will die regretting
that you will not be buried with a mirror
on your chest
so you can accuse yourself endlessly
in the endless dark. You will die forgetting
that mirrors do not show vampires as they are;
at most, there is a mist in the glass. A mirage
of immortality looking back
at a dilapidated house which, if it notices you at all,
only does so to mock you.
Dark Matter 