Mask

The poem explores an obsession with someone who refuses to reveal their true selves and challenges readers to confront their own constructed personas, urging authenticity over artifice.

I felt nothing.

Songs were mere vibrations,

Stories passed like the wind,

I tried to empathize, but my heart ceased to beat.

It was as though the world had turned mute, until I met you�"the direst of souls, if you ask me.

 

What are you? I cannot fathom you.

Are you the very definition of modern masculinity or just a façade?

Is this just an attempt to be another echo of the trend?

A hollow mimicry of the self the society wishes you to be?

 

Everything you do, everything you say, drips of manipulation.

A thousand faces you wear, none of them real.

For who are you, truly?

 

A man of a thousand masks�"none of them yours.

 

You wake each day donning a false face,

Moving through this world cloaked in an illusion,

Do you not get tired of this endless charade?

I do, trying to decipher it.

 

Who are you, truly? What lies beneath the stealth?

It is this maddening curiosity that eats me, keeps me awake at night.

I want to know who it is that ruined me.

Are you nothing more than a blank canvas?

Imitating things you were never meant to be?

 

I want to know what it’s like to inhabit that skin,

To unearth the true contours of your soul,

I want to know what that blank canvas thinks.

 

But it will remain a mystery, won’t it?

For those who claim to know you, have fallen victim to your artifice, 

Trapped in the layers you have so carefully constructed,

Your every interaction, a stage; every gesture, a calculated performance. 

And they are all too eager to believe it-  

To mistake the surface for substance, the mask for the man.

 

You have played this game for far too long, 

Perfecting your craft, concealing the cracks in your soul.

A seamless illusion, no one dares to question the truth beneath the lies. 

They think they’ve touched your skin, but they’re merely getting played by the mask.

 

I care for you because I too, was once drawn in this game of masking.

Until, I realized I don't want to wake up and put a mask that looks just like me,

Made with the best of efforts and the best of intentions,

I could no longer wear a mask that mirrored my own face.

For even the best masks, sculpted with the finest materials, 

Will never be more than a lie. 

A perfect replica, a flawless deception�"but still, a mask. 

A shell, a hollow echo of who we could be, 

and one that will erode us over time, leaving only the shape of our former selves, 

Lost in the hollow spaces between our facades. 

 

You may seek fleeting pleasures in disguises, 

But when you remove it, 

What will you find? 

Will you still recognize yourself? 

Or will you be a shadow of the person you once were, 

A faceless phantom who has become too addicted to the art of pretense? 

 

Take off the mask, and for once, see what you have become. 

A fragile, fractured soul�"

Shapeless, with no true form. 

The mask may give you power, but it will also destroy you, 

Leaving only the remnants of someone 

You can no longer call your own.