as the barber clips my hair,
there is a mirror on the wall,
there is a mirror at the back.
wedged in between,
i reel
into a tunnel of faces,
all similar!
they smile together,
wink their left eyes together,
scratch their noses together--
so cocksure
in their conspiracy together.
who, who might have done the crime?
an eye-witness,
called to a strange identification parade,
i peer at each face,
matching it with the memory of a shadow
folding into a row of shadows.
"the beard, shall we take it off," the barber asks.
"no, let it stay," i tell him.
*****
7 comments:
Just not in the mirror or the tunnel as you define it, at times even in my own routine work while talking to colleagues, I ask my self was that me or while recalling about the days events i wonder of all the roles I had played the whole day and want to know who was the true me? the only difference is I never though of putting this in words as you did :-)
This is quite interesting.
Thank you, Kalpana. We don't know what we are. We justify to ourselves everything we do, and when this happens we go away from reality.
We are the faces that have gone before us! Mirrors have lessons for us. the infinity metaphor is mind-blogging.keep it up.
we are contemporaries with everyone who had lived before us and everyone who would come after us. now that you mention it, Prabhakar, the mirror on the wall and the mirror at the back have this dimension too! we exist wedged in between, the bubbles of the moment in an eternal flow. our desire to retain the beard is to retain the illusion of being apart. frankly, i didn't go that far when i wrote this piece.-:)
come to think of it images stretching to infinity can/does create a weird type of identity crisis.
lovely poem.loved the identification parade image - how appropriate!
sometimes we surprise ourselves, madam, don't we?
Fantastic...Man's past and future in Barbers shop. U see extraordinary things in an ordinary day.
-Kannan-
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