This poem was inspired by a post on The Essence of Peopling,  by Shots of Awe, and many other inputs my mind was given. It all started with a word play on I and eye.

AN I FOR AN EYE

We’re always dotting the I’s and crossing the T’s,
Never checking the eyes, figuring out if they see.

I do not see my I the way it is. Rather,
I see I the way I think your eye sees my I.

I look into your eye and hope to see a piece,
A piece of my I reflected back from your eye.
My eye, too, sees a part of your I through your eye,
Only e’er a piece of the mysterious whole.

Looking for I in your eyes,
I can get lost in the abyss of supple spheres.

Then, through the eye I cry. For my eyes can’t see I.

Through my eyes I see all but I
And that is what I long to see.
I’ve been stranded so long at sea.
Yet, it is so close.
Feeling lost, yet so close.
So close, I can sense it,
So close I can feel it.
But, so close, I can’t see it.

Yet I know I is just behind my eye.
And yet I cannot see I.

Maybe I is not to be seen, but felt.
Not like the fabric, like the emotion.
Instinct.

What my I sees through my eye is true. Is it not?
Seeing is truth. There ain’t more real than what you see.
A stubbornly persistent illusion at best.

All this based on the assumption that what eye see,
Is real. Eye cannot see I.
Eye cannot even see eye, but with a mirror.
Even that is not I.
Eye cannot see I.
But I is true.
Truer, I could argue, than what eye can see.
Eye is not reliable.
I transcends eye.
I must be felt. Not seen.
What a difficult thing to see, for an I who relies so much on eyes.
Those other I’s have the same problem.
Though some see clearer than others.
Who is to say that what you see with closed eyes might not be light.