Panels

[Worm of Despite]

I see my face in the glass panels of a door, slightly beautiful and transparent, and I see under several lights various versions of myself in a mirror, each one less or more beautiful, according to the hue or slant of the light. At each second I am a newborn; at each angle, every light I am someone else, and in someone else’s eyes I am their idea of me. And I am my idea of me: a ceaseless me that I tuck away and am shocked to see has changed the night before, or the moment I left the mirror and returned to it. And the mirror, even, is not me; it inverts me, literally; I have sculpted myself to appear pleasing before its inversion.

I redress the pain of living with the skill of a block-mallet, a wooden, blunt tool. I see my face, ugly once and then again perhaps thrilling with energy, and I try a thousand things to gain the Godhead. I eat a banana or go exercise, or I simply relax and then later decide it’s all threads of one yarn, one mind, and we can’t control it; it’s an organ, the eyes an evolution from a simpler being, and we are trying to control what’s uncontrollable: glass, transparency, sun’s vibrancy, eyes of others, their brains, their ideas, our words, yours and their chipping away at the timbre, the fluctuations of the nether-self, the aware-self; the self we want and the me that will never be.

I am not so docile, so tragic, so rambling, so effusive to not hold in one idea: I am not; I am not; I am not. God is the only am; the only thing that is not turned about, not churned about, not filtered by a million different cycles of light, tapestries of glass, men’s construction and man’s biology; alone, naked, isolated perception in a sea of animals and space that does not answer.