There was a visual of a man in front of me
He knew his father and had lived a life worth living, and he found himself on the teetering edge of age, and he felt himself to be different than he was in the mirror, and everything around him felt of older and newer mixes constantly contrasting
He saw the TV glow with radiant hues that he hadn't seen in years, and he would blink and it would be different and modern and sleek and foreign and he didn't know this TV any longer
And he'd amble over to bed and he'd let the hours lull him forward as though they were never really there
And his father was there in his dreams, and in his dreams his father still had hair
He was a man again and born of flesh and still was young like the day they first met
And his father said something in the echoes of the dream but they were lost in the shadowy dance of the barrier between reality and the fog
And I realized then that the man wasn't seeing his father at all, no, he was seeing himself
He was looking internally, like an ego mirror, that reflected back to him the construct he believed himself to be
And it was a younger man, but not one that was truly him
This man had shades of his father, and was different from himself, and had aspects of falsehood and facade, like a mask worn along or chainmail made of flesh
And I realized then the metaphor before me, how we all construct different mannequins that represent what we think when we think of ourselves, and how often they are skewed, how easily they are deformed, how maligned they can be within our mind
And I drew in a deep breath and I saw myself in this lens
Small and fragile and pure and young and foolish and stupid and weak
I am still that boy within
My father's son
And I do not know my face from my coiling flesh and the hair embedded in my scalp
It all is the picture of me, the painting of my sense of self, the mirror of my mind
And then I blink it all away
For I shamble to the bathroom and look into the silver and that all shatters away and becomes the waste of time it always was
I'm tired.
YOU ARE READING
Lines
CasualeA mess of stuff that won't fit elsewhere. Some are pretty absurdist, no direct continuity unless stated (doubtful on that, these are meant to be one-off poems/stories). I like to explore different styles of writing in small works like this, so some...
