Beneath the mask of day, fragments of people smile

Beneath the mask of day, fragments of people smile, Wrapped in a silence shattered into things unsaid, And you will look without seeing into their fractured cleavage Unless they themselves lend you their shadowed glasses. There's a fine irony in the play of light and darkness, A silent wish to tell the world that "good" is alien to them, That their nights are sharp illusions, endless processions of shadows, But smiles that mean "happiness" seem to them only hollow echoes. They want you to discern the abyss between words, to read in the pause between heartbeats, To reject with them the space that separates, to decipher the whispers behind the curtain of speech. But there are eclipses too deep in each, unwritten in their own night, And so, similar forces drift apart, repel, by their identical nature. You don't know someone's labyrinth, you try to fool yourself that you have the key, That you carry on a map every secret corridor of your neighbor. But there are corners that only they enter, their own inviolable sanctuaries, It is terrible how each being carries its own web of darkness in secret. For, after all, they are open wounds, bearing on their face Fissures of a world to which they fly in their cold blood. Breaks that tell their stories in the barely heard whisper of the night, Windows towards mornings where yet the sun, gently, eventually rises.