The stranger in the glass

 He does not blink when I look away,

He waits in the silver, cold and grey.

A twin born of light and polished sand,

With my own face and my own hand,

But his eyes are weighted with things I’ve buried—

The ghosts of the many lives I’ve carried.

​He anchors my gaze, a relentless hook,

Demanding a price for every look.

“Where did you leave the man you promised?”

He asks with a silence, brutal and honest.

“Is this the skin you meant to inhabit?

Or just a shadow you happened to grab at?”

​I try to shave or brush the day’s grime,

To kill the clock and outrun the time,

But he stares through the iris, into the bone,

To the dark, quiet basement I leave alone.

He asks of the bridges I burned for the spark,

And why I still whistle when crossing the dark.

​I have no maps for the roads he names,

No clever logic to douse his flames.

He knows the secrets I’ve folded and hidden,

The words unsaid and the paths unbidden.

I am the jury, the judge, and the liar,

Watching my soul through a circle of wire.

​I turn off the light to make him depart,

But the questions remain, etched in the heart.

The mirror goes black, the surface is thin,

But the man in the glass is now under the skin.

The Silhouette

Twenty-eight years is a long time to hold

The shape of a man in the palms of my hands.

I was twelve when the world turned suddenly cold,

And the hourglass spilled all its heavy, grey sands.

I remember the shadow, the height, and the name,

The way that the hallway would echo your stride,

But the flickers are changing, no longer the same,

Like a photograph left where the sunlight can hide.

I search for your voice in the back of my mind,

But the frequency’s muffled, the signal is low;

The words that you spoke are becoming refined

Into whispers of things that I used to once know.

Was your laughter a rumble? A sharp, sudden sound?

Did your eyes catch the light in a gold or a brown?

The details are sinking deep into the ground,

While I wear the weight of your absence like a crown.

It’s a heartbreak of silver, a grief made of mist,

To love what is blurring, to miss what is gone.

The father I knew is a ghost I have kissed

In the quiet, blank space between midnight and dawn.

I miss you, I say to the hollows and air,

Though your face is a map that I can’t quite retrace.

But the love is a tether that’s always been there

Even if time stole the lines of your face.