by Viktor QuixoteNemesis, dealer of ironic fates, killed Narcissus by drowning--
not him, but his twin sister, on whose grace long he had fed.
Death left him peerless, his mirrored reflection nowhere to be found.
Mythical fairness slept only in most handsome bed.
Fairness so fouled complained, "What fruit compares
to that born of my mother?
What bloated prune of Poseidon be crowned in her stead?"
Diving black-water depths where dearest sister slept, Narcissus spied palest light shone from beloved face so like his own,
fated to glow unkissed amidst eternity's cold, dateless night.
Unsealing every lip, Narcissus drank of her gloam,
and drowned for the ache, all in one take. Some voice cried:
"That's a wrap, people! Good work! Now we all can go home."
Reports of Narcissus' drowning-on-set hastily were retracted,
sources confirmed he'd been pulled out by grips standing near,
rewriting iconic myth never meant to subsist as mortal man
in unscripted fate. Fairest face soon fell out of its mirror.
Drinking played hell on the actor's appearance, and he was canned.
Life stripped of mythos proved life quickly slipped out of hand.
Unemployed icons do not weather well the years.
Narcissus' power--for coaxing kind Kronos to reconjure unwrinkled time,
and lend back his fairness and perfected grace for divinely spent hour--was the power, put plainly, to stay hammered blind.
Modern eyes saw ancient coot most unsavory and self-devouring,
endlessly respinning yarns of his amorous prime.
He'd fathered many sons, born to the purple, now wearing its crown
beget of paid-in-gold trysts by a smuggled-in queen
Vestal-bound virgins whose techniques for pleasing him broke not their vow
Shrieking young starlets who begged for the Grecian extreme.
Others significant, his long ago, now considered his trow
sick yet salacious; desperately drowning in dream.
Nature's indifference first showed in a brow supercilious, at
painful boils, piles a-bleed, meting out their vulgar bane.
Soon he smelled rat, hidden between the serpents of caduceus
--two rats of recent fame, known to him as God and Satan.
"Divine speculation," Narcissus defied them, "—ever ridiculous.
When one god plays fairly, quite surely the other god cheats."
Stroke left him sullenly locked in Job's tale of two unholy foes
betting how long 'til he, so aggrieved, begged tender mercies.
Never once prayed he an end to their curse. Sheer willfulness rose,
and snubbing Job's wait, chose to die in apostasy.
Dove he through image reflected on water, and drowned in a pose;
then sank he down to the place where all vanity goes.
Out dropped Narcissus' soul onto the glassy shoals of mirror's Hell.
Up popped his vanity, bloated gigantically fed,
belching foul vapors of devoured self-rot that now, he must smell:
innocence he had led to sure perdition, by turning their heads
like his, vain. Nemesis caused the ironic exemplar to swell,
for he was no Job. Narcissus was dead.
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