Not a poem but some prose I wrote a while ago. It's a true story unsurprisingly:
Here's to you, slayer of shiny patriarchs!
I knew it was going to be a bad day. As usual, it starts with a coffee. One of my usual cafes had suddenly hiked the price of their flat whites from £2.75 to £2.95. I'm getting poorer by the day while my coffees are rapidly getting more pricey. But it's emblematic of the problem I suffer in all areas of life: I can't keep up, in fact, I'm not just not keeping up, I'm breaking down. My body is breaking down, what vestige of confidence I had is breaking down.
I'm finding it hard to find love, and my face, instead of following some sensible hyper evolutionary logic and tightening up it's etched forehead, repairing the chipped front tooth hanging uncouthly in it's gum, keeping my hair brown. Instead of doing this, my incorrigible face is continuing, no, hastening, it's acquiescence to time's merciless embrace. Time, the faceless, formless, iconoclast dedicated to the desecration of the temple of beauty we worship at. Time, the vandal who scratches new and unsightly lines into my face like some teenage dickhead keying a shiny new car. Time wreaks it's vengeance bitterly on everything that exists, everything that is gorgeous, because time is a man, a cruel and petulant ancient man. And it's an instrument used by men too, to measure their dicks with. Wasn't it the cruel old men who told us what progress was, who told us not to dilly dally.
But I wasn't some sexy stud even before. So it probably makes no difference, that's one consolation I can find in my face's slow chipping away. My only other consolation is that I'm not such a idiot to compensate for my a lack of a divine beauty by becoming a zealous adherent to the other prominent deities of money and power and machismo stupidity. No, if I can't be beautiful then I'll just be godless.
But I evidently do suffer the affliction of Body Dysmorphia. I'm ok with looking normal. It's not so much the lack of beauty that bothers me so much as an excess of manliness I sometimes read into this hairiness, this primitive chipped tooth, this big nose, these bushy eyebrows that when they twitch they flap and could almost take me into the air like Dumbo's ears do. Sometimes I involuntary catch myself in the mirror, and I see in front of me all the dirty, hairy, unrefined, un-rarefied old men who ruined the world for us all. I worry that's what I see, it's petrifies me, it freezes me in front of the mirror, staring as intently as the truest of narcissists at an appearance I can't reconcile with my nature. All I'm thinking is: am I just another one of those beasts? Is it possible to evade the description drawn in my face? Will other people recognise that I'm not a prick? Unfortunately we humans do have a tendency to read a summary of people in their countenance like it was a book synopsis.
Sometimes I think my face had a fighting chance when I younger, a chance to really be my own. But I spent those crucial teenage years, when the body ossifies and petrifies, in the company of brutes so different from me. Maybe my poor unformed face was so impressionable that it mimicked the qualities of theirs'. But actually their faces were often quite fine, so maybe my face crystallised something of their horrid inner essences. Oh God!
The mirror never shows me as the person I see in my head. So is my voice even the voice I hear in my head? Am I at all in any way the person I think I am? And so, in order not to slip into a fugue, I avoid mirrors as fastidiously as if my reflection were an evil shadow twin who might reach out through the glass, choke me to death with his crude patriarchal strength, and then step out into the world replacing me without anyone being the wiser.
This is why I sometimes wear dangly Queen Elizabeth style earrings. I wear them to offset my harsh features, as well the fact that I simply like the way they look, swinging and shimmering from my lobes like grand chandeliers, no matter how incongruent they look next to my face. But I can't wear them all the time, or even most of the time, they're clip-ons and not very comfortable alas.
So I left the cafe feeling hairy and ghastly and disheartened, almost able to feel the innermost hairs of my nearly joining left and right eyebrows skimming the tips of each other like the fingertips of star crossed lovers . I shuffled down Tottenham Court Road in a reverie only to be broken by the startling sight of one those extraordinary eccentrics, the kind that strike fear and awe in the hearts of even other eccentrics.
A very tall (he must be 6 foot 5 at least), very dark man. His midnight skin as wrinkled and soft as a worn out leather armchair. He wore dark sunglasses and his sartorial choice is always a complete boxer's outfit: blue satin robe (nothing on his sinewy torso under it) with matching shorts, and high top boxing trainers. He unsettled me. It was because last summer I used to see him everyday walk past the window of the local North London Costa that I always studied in. It was a bad summer to say the least; some (scary) teenage drug dealers had posted themselves up outside of the tube station that was on my walking route to the Costa, and they would try to harangue any innocent oddballs (since they must be on something, so the dullard thinks) into buying drugs, or would simply heckle them. That summer I had taken to wearing a risque nipple exposing t shirt and other such kooky attire, and very much felt like me and my people were under siege from the aggressive, drug dealing prudes. It was also the summer of Brexit, and reports of increasing gang violence ect,ect. I would sit in the sterile Costa convinced the end of the world was nigh. And this tall, black boxer would stride past my window everyday, completely untouched by the madness of the world and yet clearly in a mad world all of his own. I began to believe he was just a figment of my depressed summertime delirium, and I stopped noticing him after the summer ended.
But now here he was again! This hallucination from last summer, strutting along, his head breaking through the throngs of people as if it was breaking through the clouds. Impervious to the small world below him he is forever on his walk to the ring for a fight he'll never have.
I took it as a bad omen. I don't like boxing or boxers, least of all mad ones! And I was reminded of that unhappy summer. My mind started slipping, spiralling down into yet darker and earlier corridors. I went all the way back to 2001, year 8 of secondary school, I was twelve and I had no friends. One evening I watched the 2000 remake of the film Bedazzled, starring Elizabeth Hurley and Brendan Fraser, that my dad had rented from Blockbuster. It's about a lonely guy who sells his soul to a sexy devil for a few wishes. It captured my young imagination and had me wondering if the devil really exists (and is he as pretty as Elizabeth Hurley?). That night, lying in bed, I said in my head, but as if I were talking to Satan, that if he really does exist I'd give up everything if he'd give me some friends at school. I even specified that I'd give up any future hope of love. School seemed so endless and intolerable at the time, as permanent as a stone prison, as vast and arid as a desert. Life at the end seemed like nothing more than a mirage, a lie told to kids by adults in order to keep us going in. But I did get friends eventually, and they were of the type that the devil might give if he existed, they were pretty terrible.
As ridiculous and implausible as being cursed by the devil is, I've never quite managed to forget that night. And since I've had such little experience of romance and love, I tend to look for explanations as to why it seems so unreasonably difficult for me. The explanations I come up with are invariably ludicrous, and on this day I ended up settling on the 'devil cursed me' theory as being true.
It's a scary thing to believe you've really been cursed by Beelzebub himself and that all future happiness was foreclosed from the age of 12. I had worked myself up into such a febrile state of paranoia, I felt like I was on the verge of genuine madness. Would I too be walking down the street dressed as a boxer soon?
So I went to the library, a place that usually calms and reassures me. But I could find no peace there either; no escape from the hopelessness percolating through my pours, from the dread tangled in my hair and tangled in my brain. I couldn't shake the the devil I imagined to be at my shoulder. So I paced up and down the stacks of books restlessly, all the while vengefully and unfairly cursing Brendan Fraser (and he only played the innocent schmo) back, in my mind. 'Damn you Brendan Fraser! Damn you to hell! You ****** actor, did you ever even make a good film!? The Mummy was only ok, and Bedazzled is definitely ****, I got cursed by ****** film!'.
I started worrying my noisy and deranged thoughts of curses and devils and Brendan Fraser might be disturbing the quiet students trying to study, so I left the library and intended to be on my way home. But first I needed to get my bag from my locker on the third floor. I called the lift and stepped inside it. Oh no. I had forgot there are always mirrors in lifts! It was the last thing I needed. I was already on the precipice, on the verge of the abyss of insanity, one wrong move away from becoming a mad boxer. I didn't have any strength left with which to do battle with my reflection and resist it, he would swallow me whole with one twitch of his vile mouth. I couldn't break it's spell; he stared at me with the most emphatic look of revulsion and disgust I have ever seen in my life. Was I really so unpleasant?
So, up and down up and down in the lift I went, having a showdown with my shadow in the looking glass. Only one of us would make it out. It was late and I was hoping nobody else would need to use the lift and interrupt this duel to the death. At one point I was on the fifth floor and I was staring so intently at the hate filled figure in the glass that I forgot to press a floor button and the lift doors closed behind me. The lift just stayed there on the fifth floor, like my own private, creaky, dimly lit dressing room. I stared and stared and stared. I hated the man who stared back at me, and he looked like he hated me even more. My legs started to ache, I'd been standing in that lift, uninterrupted in my circular trance of revulsion, for so long. How long I do not know; that horrible old codger, time, ceases have any substance or tangibility in these kinds of circumstances. But it felt like a very, very, very long time. Sweat was running down my cheeks and off my chin like tears. I felt like I wanted to cry, needed to cry, should be crying. But I couldn't seem to do it. I squeezed my eyes like they were the bitterest of lemons, but not a drop would come out; the patriarch behind the glass simply mocked me cruelly with wrinkled, squinted eyes.
Oh god oh god! Was this how much of a man I had become? Such a man I could no longer cry tears for the pain and torment I felt in my breast! Such a man I could no longer cry tears for the curses and madness in my head? At that moment, a look of the most vicious and ugly and horrid kind swept my face, and I had the misfortune of not only feeling it, but seeing it looking back at me. Every muscle of my face writhed and undulated, and what with all the sweat, it gleamed just like a heaving pale ocean under the sun. And it was under no motor control whatsoever. I was very afraid.
But just then, something made me even more afraid, but nonetheless ripped ripped me out of my nightmare suddenly. It was the sound of the lift doors shuddering and creaking heavily behind me. They were about to open, someone was waiting on the other side! My panicked mind kicked into gear, I slammed a floor button quickly (to give the impression I had a destination, and that I hadn't just been standing in the lift staring at myself for hours) and started composing flimsy explanations for my unexpected presence in this box. My face felt like it had stopped undulating, but it was now drenched in an sea of sweat and my eyes were swimming about in it in every which direction.
The doors opened, and a girl started from my surprise presence. She spoke with a sweet Bulgarian accent
'whoa! I didn't think anyone would be in it'
'Aha...ah yeah, err surprise, ahaha, I just, em, I errr, I was just trying to decide out what floor to go to'
She stepped into lift, pressed the button for the ground floor and we were on our way down. She exuded an air of cheerfulness, but of robustness too. She began to talk to me as if she had known me all my life. The lift stopped on the second floor. She looked at me, and I replied with a twitchy and nervous smile. She asked me if I was getting out here. I said no. Oh wait, I had pressed the button for the second floor in my haste of panic hadn't I! I just laughed nervously and said I'm going to the ground floor after all, yep that was the floor I needed.
We stepped out of the lift, out of that deathly box in which I left behind my insanity and curses. Like a coffin in which I left my evil patriarchal shadow twin to hopefully rot, but I knew I'd have to face him another day. And me and this girl kept on talking. She seemed to understand that I was going through something and that I needed someone to talk to, someone to take me out of my waking nightmare. We became friends. Here's to you, Valya, killer of evil mirror people!
I went home and cried, at long last.
