My dark glasses just gave me a new angle

on being a narcissist by walking me

right into a tangle with a sign

perched on the sidewalk.

I felt in a wrestling moment that

this blind encounter could

have broken my everything.

I’ve told the eye doctor

I feel blinded by these glasses.

This time I said it’s a

black or a charcoal film

appearing suddenly like a wall.

It’s scary having walls cross your eyes

obscuring your vision.

But this is exactly what happens

to narcissists all the time.

Their inner eyelids shut down

like air raid curtains

cutting out all light transmission.

Whatever, whoever is out there,

you’re dead;

as good as nothing;

not to mention

the narcissist who falls headlong

into the pit his blindness

makes of you.

This instant annihilation

provokes violent eruptions

instantaneously in

the banished soul shrieking

for some recognition

while being swept off her feet.

This fatal flaw is so commonplace,

hitting us all in the face right and left,

yet it goes almost entirely unrecognized

and we treat it as if nothing happened,

letting nothing go all the way.

I now see the terror I’ve lived in,

the perpetual insecurity of

walking the invisible line

on the edge of nowhere between

the darkness falling from within

and the darkness falling without.

I see a man toeing this line now.

My breast wants to burst with pity

knowing something of what hell

he’s enduring since it looks so like

the condition I was in for decades:

toeing the line of perpetual terror

no one including me could identify.

Would that burying oneself

in another’s bodily orifices

could spare one the everlasting

balancing act on no footing

that this ever cresting

clash of blindnesses leads to.

Instead of a way opening before you

a way of lens shutters

shutting all too swiftly

straddles your every path,

making cut outs of any sustained vision,

leaving you without the ability

to see into others or

develop enough foresight

to plan and get ahead,

since you’re always in recovery from

the latest horror shutting off your sight

whether you know it or not.

They say narcissists are in love

with themselves; a far cry from

the truth that they are only

absorbed in the terror

of losing themselves all the time.

And you as onlooker, as lover, as mother,

what can you do watching

such a person walking the treadmill of

his perpetual perdition?

What can you do to lure him to

seek out the Minotaur,

the cat who clawed his eyes out,

or stand up to the fire breathing dragon

who singed the core of his vision

burning it to such a crisp

over and over and over again

that his true growing fortitude,

by which he has survived the monstrosity

of living in this fear,

is buried so deep it is hard to

give it room enough to grow.

But, when it can shoot tendrils out,

it makes itself so delicately

and admirably felt that

the clouds of dreads recede

opening vistas where life begins

to proceed at a steadier,

more easy going pace.

As I write and write,

all I am ever hoping to do

is lure others into becoming

sufficiently fascinated with becoming

soul opticians for themselves:

with seeing how the lenses

of our inner lights work,

converging, opaqueing, distorting,

clouding, blurring, fading, clarifying,

until our sight lines come so clear

we can see clear through our personal

and ancestral pasts and present

and into our more promising future.

Through exploring and testing

the lenses in your mind’s eye

the whole drama of your inner life

gradually becomes crystal clear to you,

as gleaming with the verges of transparency

as Bahamian waters.