Masquerade When we shed our masks of Carnival Like snakes shedding, will we die? Or will the surfeit of timelessness Drive the dagger deep into heart And still the beating emptiness within? Kipling's question - death by sword or vote? If living means that pain with strike, Chiming the hour, half, and quarter - Why not still the clock? Or is it best To play the lesser Mary, neither Madonna Nor Magdalene, but typhoid-bearer, Plaguing all my friends with woe and grief - A shallow sadness welling where the heart Once stood? I cannot press the asp close to my breast - For heartless creatures snakebite is no bane. I give my love to wife and friends as Oedipus once loved Jocasta. Will this hurt my folk Or only blind me? Tiresias tells me not... And no Antigone can throw The first soft clod to stone me to my burial. Undying, will my sun-struck carcass Lie still for crow and raven's laughter? Or will the eagle pluck my liver, toss it back, Depriving me of even that company? Flowers become pathos become bathos. Sadness blooms. A dark unfolds where once my soul In silence stood, awaiting fiat and logos. It is this vale which troubles me, and Not the one beyond. The Damnèd need no hope And so I sit, the minutes and years distilled Into each beer and shot-glass I consume. Has the dance ended? Do we our masks remove - Or has it yet to begin? copyright 28 May 2000 by Earle B. 'Glas' Durboraw; New Orleans.