Pale (early 1990's)

Pale, the light coming down, covers
my face in the mirror.
I look at my broad forehead
I look at my left eye
I look at my scarred cheekbone,
I follow the line that hugs my nose
that a bush inscribed when I
was a child.

I look at these things, one by one,
one can never grasp it all at
once, faces are always fragmentary,
refracted, and brilliantly flawed because
they are only whole in essence, and
not in appearance, I look
at these things and think of
wearing a leather glove on the wrong
hand, or kicking a ball with the other
foot, of crying when I should rejoice and
laughing in the face of tragedy. He
told me she was dead and I smiled.

Pale, pale, pale
This is a thin light which exposes me,
leaves me a bit green and sickly
I stare at a single portion of my
incomprehensible face and bore at it.
The skin is extremely pale, to repeat,
and seems to be ready to bleed.
I giggle because I like my face and
stop because I don't and feel ashamed
at my transparent, weak,
unconvincing, and total narcissism.
My nose is up against itself and I
am leaving patches where one could write
a word and I think of what that
word could be and each one that I pick
requires a bit more breath than the
last one as I try to describe my
pale, fragile soul which smiled
at the dead.