I was, after all then, as forewarned
A kind of trick of the eye, a smudge
In one corner of the frame, a lash
That made you blink, a lie, a Mephistophelean
Game, a name (monumentally monosyllabic) and now
Seeing as I must soon vanish
Into a puff of smoke
I suppose I can let you in on
Am not real, and never was
I might have run on
A bet or dare, or perhaps I just
Didn’t care, I was
A kind of screen and you were
The projector, I was a ghost, a mirror, and, thoughtless,
A specter – I would have said anything you
Wanted me to, it was your lips I
spoke with, your hands I
Broke with, it is
your hate I beat with, your words I
cheat with; only with your mind could I think, only with
Your hands could I feel;
I was a fiction, but you
were real – and now, thanks to me you’ve seen
What you really are, or could be –
And it looks like me-- Was I, then,
A demon, after all, or a kind
Of punishing angel, who spoke after my own
Perverted fashion with the voice of the departed
And the deported? Old Nick gets
A bad rap, but he never made Faust do
Anything he didn’t want to; I set it but he had to
Spring the trap—the devil made me do it! you say, who was I
To know that it was all a lie—Can it really be –
That the exile and the hounding and the persecuting of millions
Was – all the time—in me? I deceived your eye
So that you might see
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