I've scoured off my skin needing to scrub it out
I've exfoliated to the bone wanting to rub it out
I've been used and abused hoping to love it out
I've put on twenty pounds trying to grub it out

BUT
(Who doesn't love a big but?)

There's no infomercial-Oxy-booster to clean this stain
(Your absence a dark blotch in my sight)

There's no late-night ShamWow-savior to absorb this pain
(This displaced grief and fright)

There's no thought deep enough to wash you from my brain
(Nor the contrail of confusion behind your flight)

There's no shower cold enough, it weathers even this caustic rain
(Love's inexhaustible light)

Et in Arcadia badly bruised ego,
Treeing up the wrong bark, headwards into the trash-can,
My obsessive jigsaw-being, pieces ceased to fit long ago,
Cleverly I snip and cheat, what a charlatan!
My monstrous vanity, how wilfully I let it grow,
Mon Dieu! what a puffy-faced, skin a-sagging conman!

My hallowed education, so proud in my learning,
With near perfect syntax, well sin-tax!
    Embracing any seedy swingers-club, so charming!
About wisdom, the true intelligence, I am so lax,
Ever alone, fearful of any emotional caning,
Divorced from all realities, way too complex!

What now my future, a svelte *******?
Or perpetual bit-part actor, murmurs the jury,
Condemned to be a rough-shod ploughboy,
A mere half-brick in a wall of sound and fury,
No cloistered quad, or brain-storming salvo,
What now a Pedants Revolt, or intellectual menagerie?

The mirror tells no lies,
Ability inexorably led me to something so lowly,
Blindfold no longer, revealed a ruined Bridge of Sighs,
No heady aroma of beeswax and leather, and so lonely!
Unmasked my whole flawed self, which I despise,
Adrift in the cruellest of seas, so vile and unsightly

The mirror tells no lies,
No more deceits, and surely no surprise?


© Robert Porteus