A Scanner Darkly



I drop Death and dream images
Of a vaulted room. It has me inside.
I'm a faint blur, a shadow formless,
In Nature's big capsule of art.
‘Surrender me images', you call. I listen
With a turning of the head, a start.
What could a girl like me do, spaced out,
Fatuous, unnerved, with a crawling within,
A spasm threatening; like a nark;
A full-blooded gargoyle, in my dreams.
The dark, toothless grin of a maniac,
The smell of his supercharge.
I slip from worlds to worlds, I see portals,
The Heavens of God.
His minions are the stuff of my trip.
I hallucinate the joyless desire of my anima.
Drop Death, I've been locked up,
Inside the vaulted room, with mirrors on either side.
My brain is cut into two; the uncompromising halves.
Serenade me, Substance D! I can't tell
The difference between my reflection,
My photograph. Are we the same, the same faces,
The same sounds of a single monotone?
Or am I looking the glass wrongly,
Through a scanner darkly,
It is me, but unlike me,
A human, an automaton.
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Submitted on December 18, 2015

Modified on March 05, 2023

56 sec read
7

Quick analysis:

Scheme ABACDCEFGHGIJKLMNBOPDAQRRMS
Closest metre Iambic pentameter
Characters 977
Words 183
Stanzas 1
Stanza Lengths 27

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