Tiresias

Look on into the valley of the dead. (1)
The remnants of lovers so long forgot.
Let us lament the torment (2) that they fought
Let us forsake the torrid words they said
Because these self-loathing liars have led
Us to believe the lessons we were taught:
The pinnacle of existence is brought
Near to whole as the intellect is shed
What beats in our chest knows many mistakes
Our shared folly always turns to the worst
The binds that hold us that we cannot break
Keep us kneeling on this ground that You have cursed (3)
Our heads are filled with thoughts we cannot shake
None of these wells will satisfy our thirst (4)
Tormented by your fabricated lust
Precisely mirrored to our delusion
We pander to our own self-disgust
Submitting our minds to your illusion
You've bound us with endless fascination
Captivated by such a narrow trope
Firmly possessed by our infatuation
We’ve fallen victim to feigned hope
Vainly now, an ancient (5) voice pleads
To see our hearts and minds return
From the place where the shadow leads
To see what we have failed to learn

Blind witness, you see our vanities (6)
And our deepest insecurities
________
Footnotes:
(1) General reference to love poetry, especially pertaining to the Petrarchan conception of "love-sickness" and "the hunter’s lament"
(2) Unrequited love is painful
(3) Genesis: God cursing the ground
(4) lust vs. satiated
(5) interesting correlation can be drawn between this and Mary Wroth's poetry on unrequited hope
(6) Ancient of Days, simultaneously Tiresias
(7) A reference to the Ovidian and Eliot appearances of Tiresias the blind seer. Harkens the sonneteer's use of pagan classical allusion.