Parlor mutter

Some mystic thought I find instructive, taken lightly, Friend.

But grave conviction murders thought and makes a man a pious fraud.

Where superstition reigns pervasive all words serve some static end

And all that fails to publish custom somehow seems to threaten God.

I tamper not with your beliefs, Sir, prithee tamper not with mine

I too believe in ghostly objects, hold taboos, and pray for aid

And when I see a likely convert I, too, serve her words and wine

(Alas I am the hypocrite, my interest is on the maid).

My mythos come in waves of image, omens, signal from a bird

It does not lend itself to scripture; hard enough to read myself

The incomplete thing, half-perhaps done, lacking structure, lacking word.

I have no books of worthy morals bound in hide upon my shelf.

I feel my fortune, fear demise, and weep when Evil wins its cause.

Dismayed by hate, I hate right back, and wonder how I found the heat

To move so hard, with such great zeal, with no regard for written laws

The labeled shadows (not yet mentioned) filled my hands and moved my feet

That list of shadows, nearly demons, runs for pages, endless list

I see love/hate, and right and wrong, and cause and will, then look away.

With motive blind reflection breeds an impulse that I can resist.

The Beast is strong, and Thought is frail, but mist does not long bar my way: 

A man can learn to hobble fictions, practice riding useful fakes,

Or swim about in sweet conventions, frolic under custom's skirt,

For once you see how thin they be, your pity holds these feeble flakes

Aloft in mind, secure against the killing contact with the dirt.

So why embrace a vicious spook? What sacrifice might I enjoy?

I seek instead a worthy nothing, something nice, not too profound

Some concept that serves well the body, felt in mind though as my toy.

In morning fog the metaphor, the vapor rises from the ground.

As smoke with automatic grace evades the waving hand

As strollers step above the surf to walk on firm dry sand

So close above the fertile real a virile abstract hovers

A glimpse I see, how can that be? Might real and false be lovers?