Reflective Portals


It was but a simple window then.

The skies of Jersey met Manhattan,
painting neither peace or rage,
held by clouds of gauze laced boundary lines
giving temporary haven to the city’s rising ethos.

Horns,
voices,
clangs,
jackhammers,
incensed ether of mass confusion,
ambition,
survival.

All of like worthiness,
seeking like me a window,
a reflective portal that would give release
to unbridled fear,
copious love,
rampant loneliness,
and a man-child’s hope that maturity would make it all better.

Like all windows, however…

One either glances through,
contemplates the layered images,
renouncing the obvious,
allowing transparency to direct,

or

Acquiescence pulls shut a curtain of doubt,
whether ignorance,
hostility,
vengeful composure,
or guilt by default,
all obstructions to growing up.

It was but a window then.

That long ago year
where the attic of discovery
atop a theater
brought forth a youth’s
anxiety-encrusted portal.

And like any tenuous interface,
the glass separating feathered freedom from fearful man,
old visions slowly shattered in its slow-motion choice,
gave forth its seemingly invisible truth ‘til this moment…
giving birth to epiphany.

For windows provide not only answers from gifts outside,
but also provide a reflection that asks we look within,
find the echo from light afforded by shadow’s lateral arabesque,
and embrace the inner treasures so often left undiscovered.

So few of us give ourselves permission
to embrace the hidden gifts,
even as we smile at the drifting amorphous gray outside
that offers few answers,
but afford joy of new questions defining
why windowed portals provide such generous illusions.

Our reality perhaps is what we make of these reflections,
these ponderable truths one cannot at the moment escape,
for window’s insistent mirroring of what’s there.

Is it more than a passing semblance
of how we appear to ourselves?

Who does everyone else see?