The Self Regards Its Own Mirrors Poem by Mystic Qalandar

Unfasten me—this architecture of bone and breath—
unlayer the long apprenticeship of light and wound.
Let the known self fall away like silk from a scar.
I am the ritual and the blade,
the question and the one who burns to ask.

I have memorized the dark behind my eyes,
the hollow where echoes learn to kneel.
True self, false self—what are they
but two sides of a mirror
gazing at their own silver?

One wears the mask of memory.
One waits, unborn,
in the ash of every ending.
Neither yields to the other's name.
Neither is home.

I have stood in the doorway of my own vanishing,
felt the tendons of identity loosen like hymns.
And in that exquisite unmaking—
when the false one folds into shadow,
when the true one does not step forward—
there is a stillness
that watches both.

But listen:
the selves return.
Not as claimants. Not as war.
They gather like constellations,
relearning their own light.
False and true—veils the One lets fall, amused.

Now illusion kneels to enlightenment,
enlightenment bows to illusion.
The mirror empties.
In that emptiness, I am not I—
but the seeing,
the seen,
the space between.

Undivided. Whole.
All fractures luminous.
The self,
at last,
the door it always was.

—February,14,2026