OTHERWISE DIFFICULT TO RENDER

A poem from my collection, I ONCE WAS SOMEONE ELSE & OFTEN STILL AM

And that is how I have cherished you—deep inside
the mirror, where you put yourself, far away
From all the world.
- Rainer Maria Rilke

A self-portrait is hardest to locate in a place.
Otherwise difficult to render.
Be it Beijing or the Smoothie King Center.
Your charming local deli or a dark corner.
I am prone to distraction.
Often via the beautiful or the gruesome or the disappointment.
Often a thing covered in fur.
A frame cannot contain it.
The reverberation of the aluminum reflection forced upon me here.
I am chased by a sense of deterioration.
I am a half-filled human mask.
As in, the person I encounter each day will not, has not, will not always be me.
Or I melt away.
That old dull argument against the ordinary, the opposite of fear.
The mirror calls me out of myself.
Or perhaps it beckons me towards the deepest pit of myself.
Induces a sort of trance.
I peel off the layers of my apparent dome.
Like rinds tossed into the trashcan.
A symbol of the poverty of a great raw longing.
I know I shouldn’t look, but I do.
Up against the embarrassing nakedness of living.
I am smudged with makeshift habits & blurred desires.
I stare into my fish eyes, my little nose, my antiquated teeth, the dent.
O to translate my radical deficiency into something else.
To swap ordinary living for the spiritual quest.
To jot down my dreams each morning.
Otherwise, I witness & then it is gone.
The boundaries of the dream contain an image & whatever else might coincide.
Conscious, self-conscious, subconscious, unconscious.
Attempting to capture the lesser-known qualities of light.
My grandmother & I shared more than the genes for diabetes.
I am distracted by human relationships.
Even with the dead, even with myself.
Poorly handled objects scrubbed anew, fresh granola in the cupboard.
At the age of eight, I became a pretty little vessel
When the family discovered my ragged inner emptiness
Which I would still like nothing more than to fill.

This poem is from my poetry collection, I ONCE WAS SOMEONE ELSE & OFTEN STILL AM, available here as a free PDF.