The Last Mirage

He carries in his breast a locket’s chill,
A tarnished moon that holds a portrait’s breath:
A woman’s smile, half-lost, that haunts him still—
A ghost of sunlit hair, defiance death
Could never smother. Thirty years have bled
Since fever took her in that blistered town,
Where doctors spat their lies, then bowed their head,
And left her soul to sink, while he stood drowned.

*“The desert knows,”* she’d gasped, her hand a leaf
Trembling in his. *“Find where the mirage dies.
Beyond the veils of heat, beyond this grief…
The truth waits where the earth clasps shut the skies.”*
Her words, a riddle etched in acid rain,
Now drive him mad through wastelands without end.
He seeks the seam where light and land are slain,
To kneel before the lie that broke, and mend.

—

Day bleeds to night; the scorpions emerge,
Their tails like quills that ink the sand with spite.
He stumbles, parched, yet feels the creeping urge
To laugh—for pain has long outlived delight.
The stars above are vultures, cold and keen,
Their silver talons plucking at his mind.
He dreams of her: a figure in green,
Dancing where rivers laughed, now blind, confined.

*“Remember,”* sighs the wind. *“The jasmine’s scent
That clung to her like hymns to midnight air…
The way her voice would break when sorrow bent
Her throat—a fractured bell, too raw to bear.”*
The locket burns. He clutches it, undone,
And tastes the salt of decades wept in vain.
The desert drinks his tears, claims every one,
And grinds his hope to dust, again, again.

—

A shape appears at noon—a spire of glass,
Or is it stone? Its edges writhe and twist.
His pulse, a moth, beats frantic in the mass
Of veins gone dry. Is this the dying mist
She spoke of? Closer now—the vision shimmers,
A trembling throat of light, a liquid spire.
He runs, though flesh cracks, though the world grows dimmer,
Toward the lie that kindles his desire.

But as he nears, the tower melts to sand,
And in its place, a well of blackened bone
Gapes wide—a maw where all illusions land.
He screams her name, a raw, unheeded groan.
The earth beneath him yawns. He falls, unbound,
Through layers of the world, through years compressed,
And lands within a cavern, vast and drowned
In echoes of the hearts it’s dispossessed.

—

There, in the dark, a figure cloaked in dust
Sits weaving threads of shadow on a loom.
Her face—a blur—but when she speaks, her voice is rust:
*“You seek the truth? Then face your borrowed tomb.
The desert’s truth is this: it grants no answers,
Only the thirst that carves its creed in skin.
Your love is ash. The mirage never cancels
The curse of wanting what can never win.”*

He staggers, clawing at the phantom’s veil,
But fabric parts to ash beneath his grip.
The cavern shrieks; the walls begin to wail
As centuries of voices lose their grip.
*“Why show me this?”* he roars. *“Why spin the thread
If all it weaves is void?”* The weaver sighs,
Her hands stilled. *“Fool. The truth you chase is dead.
It died with her—the moment she closed her eyes.”*

—

Dawn finds him crawling on the desert’s tongue,
His nails torn, lips a cracked and bleeding hymn.
The locket’s chain has snapped. The portrait, stung
By wind, now flutters—lost, a spectral limb.
He watches as her face dissolves to air,
A final theft by sands he can’t outrun.
The truth, he sees, was never somewhere *there*,
But in the love he buried, grain by sun.

He laughs—a sound like roots that split a stone—
And lets the desert take him, breath by breath.
The sky, indifferent, grinds his flesh to bone,
And sweeps his name into the arms of death.
But in the moment when his heartbeats stall,
He feels her fingers brush his own, so near…
A mirage? Maybe. Yet beyond the pall
Of time, he smiles. The truth is finally clear.