The Mask of Tourmaline

Twice the night had fallen upon a sleepless slumber, Yet again awoken by winter when the third was three in number. I sense that a silence doth sneak ‘tween cracks of weathered wood, Conniving with that which shadows show to those whose senses could. Turning my head to a feather’s peck from a pillow that knows its head, Which sighed an arise, yet again deprived of night inside a bed. Silence is but a broken echo of what’s been left behind, The hum of a drum an ear can hear when sound has yet to hit the mind. It sits as static in a cerebral stereo inside the cortex, Awaiting for the inflammation of radio stations that hit the aural vortex. As I’m laying locked in boredom, I anticipate what sound is next, I feel a face from the stimuli I’ve learned to sense in its beta test. It floats aloft the etheric froth of mental form, Drifting betwixt the cirrus silence that stirs cold air with warm. An inaudible, tasteless and invisible gas careens in incandescence, My skin between the dermis and dream in evanescence of effervescence. Abrupt by sanity of such insanity I fancy, born by brief observation, Invented by subtle bouts of confusion and certainty of hallucination. A peculiar perched mask seems to stare from my room’s fenestration, “An intrusion,” I suspect, “pervaded by you again?” I ask it in frustration. I search for holes dug ‘neath white bone, wan in bleached complexion, Which once watched from my window, pretending illusory perfection. Instead, indeed, I begin to see two pairs of blackened eyes, As holes who beam behind a shadow in solemn disguise. Purloined I’m poised in a lucid melt, frozen in poisonous oppression, Wrought by a face, I thought was another, which I once suffered from in suppression. Shifting my view to find fault in my faculty, I sought salvage in sight of such psychic insanity. My fidgeting efforts prove futile, the carven masked eyes fix upon mine still! Incessantly I’m stunned in speculum, boiling in a benumbing brisk of thrill. Alas, my eyesight: no longer the sole sense of this deville, What once was mere vision hails now my ears with a trill. My breath and pulse waxing slower, and waning ever faster, Aghast by celestial sounds from a mask that’s blackening faster. Whence from my vision avowed, to the vacillations I succumb, Of undulations the mask strums, moving inside my eardrums. Who brings to me this apparition, arisen from perhaps an adumbration, Of a visit from he whose grim reaping, lends to the living certain cessation? And then in reminiscence, to my mind arrived the anamnesis, Of the shelf that shelters a book one might otherwise dismiss. Within its parchment pages, whence in refuge resides a clue, To what this mask is made of; when, where, and why; by who? Pins prick from prior paralysis, upon my dermis disguise of bone, I shiver and grab the book and beg, bound reason to me be shone. Within this covered lexicon read acrylic words in arcane diction, Which most readers would anthologize, as ancient artifact and fiction. The first supposition tis true, that this book was bound in the archaic ages, Amiss the latter assumption that fable unfolds by the turning of its pages. In my desperation I stir commotion, reading over every turned folio, Longing for light in yonder window break, as did Shakespeare’s Romeo. Yet each passage read of occult sorcery, or a variety of mages, No line of a black mask, appeared to me on any of these pages. All hope seemed to escape with passing page, turned by my flustered fingers, Then a sudden zephyr blown ingress to the page on which now I linger. On the bottom right reads in numeral: “Eight-hundred and eighty-eight,” On which reads the magical recounted chronicle of myth regarding fate. The fluorescence of the onyx mask that posts upon the windowpanes, Shares the ashen-sheen on a mask I’d once seen that had brought me pain. An oblong oil-painted portrait, ebony and blush of a leaded stink, Its caption reads: “The Mask of Tourmaline,” inscribed in faded ink. To the left of the ghostly image reads a paragraph like a spell, A warning of dark wizardry, which concocts black masks in hell: "Animated by a wizard whose avarice bears blithe the thaumaturgy, To forge a warlock’s soul inside a blackened stone, This augury and the legerdemain required of such magical metallurgy, Siphons a ruby from the fire inside his pelvic bone. His soul is trapped in a putrid shell: his very own decapitate skull, On which will gleam a glowing garnet, glimmering silver and sapphire, His eyes shall cry with weeping, sunken, hollow two eyeholes, Luring any victim to view the blue of its eyes’ lustrous fire." Such dread and morbidity of a lost soul; ‘tis most tragic, When trapped in a mask made by evil mischievous magic. I thought such malice must succeed from a previous tumorous terror, And knew what reconnaissance be sought by its hidden wearer. Returning my gaze to the wraith in the window, I remember that it has my mind muddled in limbo. This mask of such achromatic complexion, To my horror, reflects an unintended invention.