Narcissus, you lacked ambition.
Vainly tracing the lines of your shimmering face.
Cephisus surely taught his boy
water’s unreliability?

Mere rainfall could sever your gaze.
Ringlets swelling, gliding across the glassy pool.
Concentric collisions
marring that flawless face.

Only a breeze
hissing through the forest’s fallen leaves
warping your reflection.
Worse still,
the ripples jarring you awake,
flooding your pristine ears
with wretched birdsong,
the wind-borne mutterings of lesser men.

—

What we could teach you, Narcissus.
We need neither some vindictive goddess’s deception
nor the piteous cries of some love-struck boy
cursing us as he falls, butchered by his own hand.

We’ve outstripped you,
with faultless, immortal faces
frozen in zeros and ones.
Not merely captured–
sharpened, filtered, retouched.

You rank amateur.

You never felt the ecstasy
of shedding all periphery
all your senses conspiring,
rejecting even a thought that’s not your own.

Of squeezing into a snug, silent room
with one dim glow
no hunger,
no unsated thirst.
Watching only your face,
hearing only your thoughts,
rendered in only your words,
echoed from your splendid voice
to your perfect, entranced ears.

-Jason McKinley Williams