The Shrine In The Mist

I travel toward a Shrine that is set in a mist--long have I been on the way. I hear dull rasping whispers afloat on the night: Are they spirits conferring, friendly to me and my journey, or the half-smothered mockeries of the fiends that I know--that I know?-- They that sneer and pass on the winds in the night. I travel toward a Shrine that is set in a mist-- By day I am beset by the beasts of my nethers and awed by the old bleached

adavers that strew the intricate alleys of vision.

I peer at you, O glutton, well-fed, nigger-hipped, bag-eyed; at you I am peering, And wonder whether the Shrine is hid in the mists of your belly-- Wondering whether the Truth be not a belch and a leer and a lusty young wench. And I peer at you, too, O Gautama, the purpled renunciant, great Shadow-Eater: I peer at you there on the roadside, where you sit ’neath the Bo tree, motionless, graven as death, solved in thy pulseless Nirvana-- Wondering whether the Shrine is hid in the mists of thy brain.

Am I mocked? Am I followed? Who goes there? Hands off! thou Vile Thing! Thou knowest not me nor the thing that I seek: The Shrine that is set in a mist--over THERE, just BEYOND.