Fearful Esoterics

With common tongue outside the circle

Photo by Dollar Gill on Unsplash

And so it has come to this end,
our semi-parasocial sorcery, sealed
with me again outside the circle,

their chorus of knowledge and inclusivity
once more diminished to my lone voice,
as I had foreseen, inevitably,

for I am the only one I know implicitly
who could grow immutably
comfortable inside muted, liminal,
hypothetical spaces,

never within,
but adjacent

to the room where magic is woven,
embroidering enchanted threads of me,
vicariously — sometimes obliquely —
from my own unknowable comfort,

crafting legends heard third-hand,
but only ever truly known
in nebulous, fleeting freefall

where words, images, and ideas
fuse what’s worth knowing
into white-heat of what’s known,

all the while, with eyes that see
without risk of being seen;

with ears that listen only
to spells and spell-casters,
with no need to hear
conjuring of true connection;

with one foot grounded
in a collective here-and-now
while the other remained
anchored just outside the door,

at the ready to turn heel and bolt
at just the right moment
or wrong tone struck, this

virtual virtuosity is
of no singular sensation;

it piggybacks upon decades
of other brilliant sages’ mastery
of photon and electron,

maths and machinery,
pixels and cursors;