The Self

Lookin’ in the mirror
Looking back at me is the work of art
Of a plastic surgeon
Who designed this face for the fashionable
Look of the moment

I breathe in deeply
A deep sigh raising my chest expanding beneath
These enhanced breasts
Of perfection as seen on the best looking women

My smile of pouting lips
Expanded by collagen and painted by Arden lipstick
Enhances the sexy look
That cameras aim at to clickety-click
In the sniper’s crosshairs

This hair pretty and straight
What colour is it now? – yes blonde
It has been red and black
And brunette a while – it’s hard to recall its real colour

The skin, I’ve heard say
Is the body’s largest organ; it’s what we all see
We’ve gotta look good
My outer skin is the me that you’ll see
Your public perception

I was looking at old photos
Me as a girl on a beach when I was little
Still cute and chubby
Now where is the resemblance? What is the real me?

The primitives of stone-age
When they painted their bodies in ceremony
To hunt in camouflage
They led the way in decorating the skin -
The value of this change

Of their spirits perhaps
They believed in the protection of the clay layers
From evils afloat on air
That tiptoed in the night on the edge of their lives

The self: from those days
Of clay to these days of plastic reformation,
Has become a hidden self
Masquerading as something unlike what we are,
An intruder in disguise

***

Like a painting – The Scream!
A vision, looking back, pretending to be me
Its surface of brush strokes
The signature of the artist, not my gene pool

The dinosaurs – from their bones
Of sixty-five millions years of age, the scientists
Try to detect the reality:
What they looked like, what they ate, what they thought

My covering of skin
Manufactured and manipulated – hides similar secrets:
Mysterious anonymous monsters
Dinosauric in their separation from the unreality of my flesh

Like the mists of clouds
In the mountains – you can walk through them
But can never take hold;
Of them there is no solid foundation, just floating ego

The grooves of my forehead
The wrinkles around my eyes that told of my laughs,
Of my worries and concerns;
The sag of my ageing breasts cured and sexed-up

These traits all removed
Nothing left for the anthropologist to investigate –
To locate the real me,
For me in my reflection to see my real self

***

The fog of the shower
Mists up the mirror
The reflection of me disappears
Beneath the watery vapour
Tears of the times
Deleting oneself
From one’s own sight
A blinding trickery
Embellished in glass
Of the mirror framed
By cheap aluminium
In a white-tiled
Bathroom going mouldy
In its twilight years

***

Trapped in a puddle on a watery-wet street
The rain tumbling upon my umbrella
Leaking a circle of drops around me
In an aura of tears

Trapped in the puddle is my reflection found
Pocked by the drops of rain like a disease
For which I should stay bedridden
In bleak isolation

Trapped in the puddle this water going nowhere
Just rising and rising to burst its emotional banks
Then drain away to the sewers
Wasteland of our lives

Trapped in the puddle I stand flooded with grief
Somewhere here I have lost myself and found myself
The ripples wash over me like waves
Burying me at sea

***

The Bondi coast
I swim from south to north
I swim from north to south
Laps of the bay
To keep this humble body lithe
To show bikini-clad
Extremely bare bodies
That there is beauty in age

The salt water
Preserves me like salted beef
The sun crisps me to an attractive brown

***

I run the beach
Loping on the hard sand
Athletic legs avoiding arthritis
With regular exercise
And a careful diet
And copious vitamin supplements

I dare to sit
On Saturday afternoons
Amidst the beautiful
Bodies that decorate
The broad expanse of sand
In stunning repose – queen of the beach

***

The mirror – tears blur my vision
I have lost a husband – he says I have lost myself
I’m not the woman he married – where is she?
I stare at her – she can’t answer that question
She raises a gun and points it at me
Resemblance shattered!