Master of disguise

I am never sure of which side
will face me tonight.
We sit down in smoke filled rooms
under whiskey coloured half light
This cities loud yell
Still filling our brains-

Communication is stilted,
stifled,
overwrought and intensified
by the sheer enormity of everything to discuss.
A sidelong glance
across this heaving room,
can reveal
a parallel universe
of intricate and myriad meanings.

And yet it's this look which so deceives
for in the pit black of iris
still plays a light- a fire.
This flame can flare or flicker
and to look too hard
is to extinguish.

Your elusive personhood
twists and turns and like a prism
fractures light.
Your splitting self
becomes an untouchable
infinite reflection in the looking glass of life.

In a striptease of revelation,
i am allowed to glimpse
differing selves
that linger in the minds eye
occasionally i can touch your
chameleon skin.
But the hand may linger too long
or the mind will try to retain
this sensation,
this seductive communion.
So the skin will flush crimson red
and fingers will be burnt by poisonous secretions.

You play this game so magnificently,
i wonder at your sanity.
In having millions of facates,
do you still have anything at the core?

Or have you achieved this ultimate goal?
In the obliteration of one true self
is there delicious freedom
in being all things to all men?

Humanity does not desire intimacy.
Brute proximity to visceral reality alone,
Is almost to painful to bear.
So propinquity to another
can in it's desperate realness
become a stranglehold.

The shackles of stasis
are excruciating to you
time to shift and change
and break loose again
The master of disguise.