The naked I
Cannot see itself
So it sews a tattered garment
From pieces it finds
along the way.
I have a confession:
I am mere clever imitation;
And I have stolen you blind.
You never felt the snips
those glittering bits of you
You never noticed
and now, I have sewn myself from you.
I am a thin patchwork
A tissue of lies.
Thank you, my victim,
For the way you held your head,
as you taught me
to see the Earth as my Mother.
And from another one of you,
your happiness in the rain.
From you, and you,
the way you kiss before, and say thank you afterward.
I have ruthlessly ravaged the graceful way you walk,
and your cynical, dead-eyed stare.
You were long, long gone,
When I began to wear
your laugh, your leather, and your hair.
This one taught me to kill,
That one to sing,
Treasured things in which I clothed
My terrified naked I-ness.
You are all imprisoned within me;
and I am nothing without you.
I have forgotten your name,
The one whose gentleness I took,
Or that look,. as the music burst
Like the blood you let
from your opened veins.
I have become
your poisons and your passions all,
A merging surgery
A careful, desperate, slow sewing.
I am just pieces,
Strung together on an I beam.
A clever copy
With frayed stitches and threadbare seams.
The naked I
Cannot see myself.
July, 2006, Oakland, CA;
June 22, 2011, Brookings, OR.
This was written at the height of my disenchantment with the SF Bay area. I found myself surrounded by a culture whose highest ambition seemed to be to imitate others. I realized that I, too, could trace most of my habits, thoughts and mannerisms back to other people from whom I had copied them; fragments of others whose journeys had taken them onward, leaving only a distorted, haunting echo behind.
This poem was first published in "From the Dark Side," an anthology of stories and poems compiled and sold on Amazon.