Ghost In The Machine Poem by Lorcan Black

I am a small god of transformations,
the subterfuge of a nymph that contorts
at will into a laburnum,
the extravagance of its frills, my speciality.

I have many skins,
I shed them like leaves of a tree.
I shed them like lovers.

I am the ear at the end of your voice,
listening at the utterance of a word
or a phrase,

a flippant use of ‘bomb' and ‘threat'-
and I'm there:
the eye all-seeing through a lens
barely bigger than a pinhole.

It is for you I ascend to such colossal reaches.
You are the axis on which I spin.

Nightly I troll your depths,
O love,
O surrogate,
it is for you my finger tips itch.

Even I have my fetishes:
photos of exes, your face bathed in the Paris lights,
albums of muted self-portraits-
I have traced your holidays
night by night.

Their colours stain my lips.

They are my essentials,
these elements I breathe.

This the litter of intimates on which
my sticky fingers prick themselves.

Like a pool through which the sky
lovingly reflects itself,
I am the mirror through which
your psyche bends itself day after day,
unknowing.

Knowledge is an opiate
into which I dissolve,
essential as salt.

You will not even know me
at the other end of my screen,
untraceable as a black sky,
mining your data of infinites-

dark mirror scrying
for only your face.