The Demon in the Mirror, or The Scrying Mirror

The Demon in the Mirror, or The Scrying Mirror

The only way that I can justify
my actions–it’s my base humanity:
men, desperate, those deeply suffering
act sometimes with irrationality.

A month had passed since I had surgery
to cut out from my body part of me:
my prostate that benignly grew too large.
My urinary function, it impaired.
Antibiotics that they’ve given me
as treatment with this recent surgery
disturbed the microbiome in my gut
and my digestion wasn’t up to snuff.
I struggled with a painful hemorrhoid
and, with my doctors, how I felt annoyed.
More fiber, laxatives, what they prescribed,
but both those remedies, before, I’d tried.
I never turned to demonology
but desperation, all that I could feel.
The constant stinging pain inside my ass–
be damned forever if that pain could pass.

I read about that divination means
of scrying, mirror gazing, what to see?
The first step that I took, my path of doom,
into a mirror in a darkened room.
By gazing at reflective surfaces,
emerge from them, some ghostly images.
My soul, the price this wisdom purchases.
How from the mirror, spirits might appear.
A genie from a bottle, summoning;
for answers in the ether, rummaging.

For hours and hours, how long that I would wait,
my body lying on the floor, prostrate,
and by my arm a mirror on the ground,
the ceiling of the room, to, upward faced.
The room is dark with no electric light.
Pervades the room, the darkness of the night.
There, by my forearm, into it, I gaze.
I think of nothing in that special way
the years of meditation, in me, trained.
I thought that scrying could be innocent.
Of divination, I was curious,
but, too, the church forbade such practices.

Not too long after I began to scry,
the ghostly faces, how they would appear.
It was a happening, unusual.

The mirror shimmered. I relaxed my gaze.
I use some cream to, pain, alleviate.
I feared that my surrender was too late.
I cried out, “Cure me of my hemorrhoid!”

The demon shook his head from side to side,
most sadly like he truly sympathized
with me and this, my painful malady.
These words he spoke, his raspy, spirit voice:

“The bad bacteria, you must destroy
to change the microbiome in your gut.
It’s bleach you need, the special kind they use
to purify that water in the pool
you swim in when you go to exercise.
An extra mouthful, swallow it right down
and those bacteria won’t stay around.
You’ll cleanse your gut and that relieves the strain
upon your rectum when you defecate.”

Enraged at once, when I had heard his words,
I cast the scrying tool away from me.
The spirit disappeared, then, instantly.
I had full knowledge that I’d been deceived.