Jason was different, as everyone knew.
He lived in his own, secret land.
Aged six he attempted to leave through the mirror -
they all wondered just where it would end.
He spent hours pursuing the smell of a colour
and days on the search for a tune,
and though he lived far from the paths of our seasons
time caught up with him all to soon.
Jason loved questions but slighted the answers.
„Who put the salt in the sea?
Why don’t we remember ahead, only backwards?
What is it like not to be?
And where do the men in the mirror retire
when we turn our faces away?
Are they dancing in hallways of silver and light?
Do they wither and fade into grey?
Jason, the dreamer, grew up in due course,
found friends who sometimes understood,
a job that did not interfere with his ways
and his lifetime just slipped by for good.
He still saw the marvel in rainstorms and stars,
asked his questions, though no one payed heed.
He’d spend weeks on evoking a dream he once had
and years on a book none would read.
„Why is infinity outside our grasp
when finiteness seems sometimes so small?
How do we know we’re awake and not dreaming
and is there a difference at all?“
And often he’d gaze at the man in the mirror
so unlike the one in his mind,
and he’d search for the boy in the lines of a face
that seemed to have left him behind.
Jason, white-bearded, turned fragile and frail
his ideas still blossoming rich.
„Why, pray, does time flow in just one direction
and who decided in which?“
As his friends shook their heads at his whims now and claimed
they prefered to be aging with grace
and his neighbours were secretly laughing he stayed
more and more to himself these last days.
Sometimes they still saw him, a smile on his face,
chasing leaves in the flashes of fall,
but he felt he could no longer run with the wind,
although he could still hear it call.
He stayed in his house filled with mirrors and dreams
in a body he could not abide,
and the face of a hundred old men staring back
at the child that was hiding inside.
* * *
Jason, the weird, disappeared in the end,
last seen the first Sunday of May.
Some say in a house of reflections and dust
he just withered to fade into gray.
But Jason has finally left through the mirror
and reached for the opposite side.
There he dances forever with gentle, small steps
in hallways of silver and light.
Eva, Oktober 2001