a poem about a poem

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How many poems were written about other poems?

Is it worth doing this?

You could write a poem about just the last line or about the entire first poem.

Then repeat the process.

this is my attempt at a "poem about a poem" and also self-referencing poem

The Infinity Mirror
THE INFINITY MIRROR

Read it as a poem where the mirror is personfied as the artist. So you have to decide for yourself who is she/he/it and what is my relationship to the mirror as an artist personified.

Partly a poem about schizophrenia where the voices are imagined as images or ideas reflected back, and language is also reflected back.

Also about narcissism on a personal and societal level, the internet, infinity itself, and the mirror, where numbers and human reflection converge.

Touches on duality, as in the existence of the self as its own entity and as perceived through the "mirror" or warped interpretation by others in society.

also about surveilllance, the powers that be penetrating an innocent mind.



The Infinity Mirror
Reminiscent of a dream:
(The mirror, the ghostly figure,
The long, loving grass.)

The infinity mirror, for all its potential
To smooth over the untamed expanse
Of humanity's contours,
Exposes blood with shaving blades,
And generousity in masquerades.

And still the pallor of blush,
And the discoloration of adoration,
Are but servile to anticipation

The reflector of infinity
The eery promise
Reaching towards divinity
Or a torturous, blind hell-bent path

The blind mirror promises
Infinity, duality
The shattered, puerile ghost caught between
The Ubiquitous, sterile host of magisterial illusion

The fragmented stone beneath him
Like an altar on a monestary
Grounding him to the magestic illusion
Of groundless deceit, Of Boston's conceit

Revere that curse! Oh arrow-bent skies
Of intrepid, oblique, malleable time
That bends about paths through human hearts
To human marrows, to decay, to remorse

The skin, like a cage like a gibbet upholding the body
Knows not the force of infinity's grasp
Until it overtakes him in a moment of intrepid deceit.

In these hallowed halls ghostly particles dance,
Ghostly bodies collide and recombine into once visible
Charades of macabre cavemen.

Once, always visible in the mirror, unknowable is the heart.
In this illusory rebirth, is the ghost in the machine

Identity is unknown to the mirror (clearly)
Vanity is unknown to the self
How transparent the mirror makes
Blood-meat of a man!

Gushing listlessly, he retraces the mirror's arrows
Onto the lines on the page.
He retraces the chalk on the lines.
He becomes just the vane words on the page.

Words, and the mirror of language
The potency lost to fragmented duplication.
The mosaic is born,
Unseen, to vague, blurred visions of a fragmented nation.

But language outcasts him,
Him tangled deeply within its moat,
Its dubbed deeply embedded within him,
Ah, again the duality!


His mirror-image, the words
Against the page, untold silhouettes
Of a dark, flickering, menacing display
Of brash omens.

The words, his craft of silence's
Burrow, of despair's laundry,
Of an empty room without
Any charge at all.

The words, against the words.
But that he sees not.
The words against the self.
He sees not.

Blinded by narcissism, by that mirror.