I woke and thought of you, I slept and dreamt of you, you unfinished, silent fountain, glimmering oblivion in stolid repose.
I walked along the catalogues,
and peered at awful oddities, and rent myself in listless lots, in search of you.
Would you believe, for being willing, I found your form in all?
The black, the brilliant, broken ghosts, all beauty something you had bade me see.
The hallowed halls I entered, the crumbling corridors I left, mere rooms inside your story's speechless lines.
And in each crossroads of the endless land I gazed upon your pain.
Your glory called to me behind my shoulder, around each corner, in the eyes of strangers, in the salt of my own will.
But when I see you, as from nowhere, what is it that I see? Am I even truly seeing you?
Or dread made manifest, are you a mirror trained upon the hollow of me?
It never mattered to the ages. It will never matter hence.
And so I seek to let it pass, and to deny the overburdened synapses, the singeing edge,
Lifeless, locked in orbit round unasked questions and unraveled seams.
Pictures taken at Naturhistorische Museum, Vienna, February 2020.