Ava's poem

I

am

Masomenos.

The fission between happiness and sadness, hot and cold, shadow and substance.

Masomenos, child of two opposites that never should have met.

I am the lowly and the great: living in the castle and on the streets.

When the earth and sky, sun and moon, lightning and thunder met, I was created.

I am tangible and elusive.

The seen and unseen.

Known and unknown.

I am Masomenos, who never should have existed but was needed here all along.

I am not living or dead.

Not invisible but not seen…

Masomenos, the offspring of lies and truth.

I definitely exist. Yet I do not.

I am the impossibility of the world, everything that ever existed pureed in a blender until it was nothing.

Then it was me.

I am the shattered fragments of a golden mirror that wasn’t meant to be, red rain falling to a cracked glass that is lying on the pavement until all disappears, and then it’s there again.

Like some celestial merry-go-round, in the sky, that keeps things going: a piece of chalk writing words on the sidewalk by itself—

What it writes makes no sense.

But I do.

I am Masomenos, spinning out of control, on a tiny speck in the universe.

Five while crocodiles biting each other’s tails until they disappear, and then they’re there again.

An infinite pink ribbon, wide as a fingernail but long as time wraps and re-wraps itself about the earth.

Only I can untangle it.

Mortal, but here until the end of time.

I

Am

Masomenos.