Mirror

Ugh. Lordikins. This is what forced poetry looks like. Happy now, McLean? Haha...

Hello,
reflection of me,
Tidy and square. 

I am rough around the edges.

You remove them,
film away the wisps of hair
and replace them with corners--
corners that dig into
the corners of eyes.

You put the light behind me,

make me look lit,

retiring my tiring skin.

I dip in and out of your frame:

in and out of Worlds.

But only you show me

only what I can't see.

And then I fear that you forget me

like all the other surfaces,

like all the other faces that can-

not tell the time.

But I turn to you again,

and there you are:

looking at me

while I am looking at you.

I breathe,

and you breathe too.

Reviews

[hjcm]

I like it. The - you might call it - forced tone you've got here, that awkward "of me" possessive, actually helps with the turn in that first stanza on the repetition of "corners". In fact, the isolation of that second line is really powerful - and then of course you have a 'box' created by those two lines; even though they're not equal in syllable count, the iamb in "reflection" compliments the trochee in "Tidy".

Your use of repetition is awesome - with "corners" it becomes a jaggedy definition of a restricted space; elsewhere it highlights the doubling of the self. This mirroring complicates the narrator, especially in the cases where the two parts are not exactly 'symmetrical' ("retiring" and "tiring", "surfaces" and "faces"). The reflection has that "unheimlich" (Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny) sense of being something unsettling, producing that "fear" indicated at the beginning of the final stanza. The last four lines are fascinating - you have the reflection's actions bracketing the narrator, whose voice here is irregular (in syllable count) and arguably unsettled. But there's also a kind of hung completion in that image, where the reflection asserts existence by "looking" and "breath[ing]" but is still a mimickry of the narrator.

Fabu. :D