The Jeweller

Very slowly he sipped his tea

Not shifting his glance from the thick double

Spaced printing he read with his jeweler's eye

Engrossed in his corner

He passed onto the other inhabitants of the room

A scrawled insularity of time and space

For both passed him by with the speed of light

Not unlike the flow of substance however varied

Into that lysergic entity known as the black hole

He was hardly ugly for his time

And conversation was certainly not lost on him

Drastic measures were called for

And as in antiquity the lonely man was blessed

With wisdom to the point of desperation

But there in his corner, developing around him

Like a sun was a climate of such rare beauty

That sight and sound could no longer be considered

Sufficient food for the senses

And he had begun to notice as his hearing failed

That mind and matter were in no way connected to one other

As if in fact the one could not propose and prove

Its erotic existence in terms of the other

"What does this word mean?"

He enquired of the solemn waiter hopefully

"Nothing for desert sir", came the reply

"Perhaps a cocktail, demitasse or a herbal essence

It helps the breathing you know sometimes"

"The bill, if you don't mind", quickly he shot back

And as the patter of the feet faded in the room

For he barely heard them now, his eye slowly began to close

And by the time he emerged on the sunny street

He was forced to rely entirely on the other eye for help

But happily it continued its many functions

Blinking gently for lubrication and registering images

It was rush hour in Hawaii only ten a.m.

So turning into his street

He stopped at the drug store and bought an eye patch

That soon covered the reluctant eye

Climbing the stairs he pondered what to do next

He would call a doctor and have tests made

Eat nourishing food and if necessary consent to surgery

The last resort of the gambling man

And at one a.m. he awoke from a dream

And after fumbling his way in the obsolescent light of his room

He peered into the rusty veins of his mirror

And lifted away the patch, what he saw astonished him

Where once was tremulous tissue and membrane

Was now a follicle and perfectly formed vagina with vulva

Overgrown and mysterious, unrevealing and still to the untrained eye

But in the deep dark recesses of that sticky occlusion

Lay the unclosing watchful eye of disgust in its closing moments

Lunging forward and hungry for the cold light of days