Reality’s Faux Identity

People become,

But is it a change

Or

Part of progressing

With backward reach

To what one was,

When being most conscious,

Most aware of thoughts,

Ambitions,

Emotional shocks,

And intellectual “what ifs”,

The real self.

Might there have been…

That time when brazen thrust

Knew no enemies,

Felt no adversarial pressures,

That time when who you were

Is what you have returned to?

Might this be the saga of many a poet…

An imagist whose ability to express who and

What he or she stands for,

Longs to escape

The bubble of encased narcissistic ambitions?

Such an imprisonment, this.

A capture that poets know has a price,

The inability to garner any respect for self-indulgent expressions

While trapped in this instrument of false identity,

Projecting but a walking specter,

An invisible contaminant alone in a crowd.

The faux person,

Having lost the authentic self,

Remains but a shadow

With no escape in sight.