Masquerading Identities
by Odin Roark

As many hide,
some don a new mask daily,
or network from screen to screen,
meeting only handles.

How mercurial reality continues.

Capricious personas,
desperate validations,
abandoned spirits,
ever bouncing from
long term hopes
to short term,
monthly,
weekly,
daily,
embracing a lucky minute.

Such a house of mirrors.

Proffering importance
by authenticating image
with plastic,
Amex,
Visa,
Master,
Gold,
Platinum,
Black,
paranoia rampant,
fearful a hacker is merely waiting.

Born with sentience,
we still labor incessantly at being.

Selfhood remains
just another day’s disguise,
sporting flirtatious glances
destined as tangential moments
projecting made-up fear wide-screen,
a projection bent on immersing consciousness
into but a vacuous tunnel.

Consider what it might be like
to step out onto a side street sidewalk,
gaze upon the concrete…
and wait.

For whether today,
or tomorrow,
ancestral insects
will always be only who they are.

To pause and allow
is to appreciate this lesser world
having never succumbed to playacting,
at least not man’s kind.

Such minuscule life
never suffers restless nights
over identity versus anonymity.

Yet…

Who among the many
hasn’t stared at a sleepless night’s ceiling
and maintained a stare-down with
an eight legged observer?

Ever wonder what it sees?

Unlike us,
it is not blinded by a lonely search for identity,
satisfied as it is,
being who it is
living the venturesome life
pronounced at birth,
reigning over its rightful real estate,
fully owned without pretense,
a life without daily masquerades.

Perhaps…

If it could talk
it might advise us
to own who we are,
lest we remain
identity rentals
parading through
urgency’s endless Mardi Gras.