~
alone and an imposter,
deep in syndrome.

she absorbs the frost of seasonal ghosts
and hopeless feelings
of death and darkness.

she only shows one side of her every time.
she calls a random number
from a bar in the middle of the night,
seeking to confess
or find solace in the voice of a stranger.

but any stranger might just happen to be
a lie detector.

still she lays bare all the duplicity
and fragmentation of self:

prescription bottles with two different names,
elaborate façades in Los Angeles
and in New York,
so complicated she creates
something she calls the lie box.

inside her purse there's a collection
of file cards. "I tell so many lies," she says.
"I have to write them down and keep them
in a box so I can keep them straight."

alone she waits for either
sweet apricity or identikit:
each a memento of her faces.
~

The mind it yells ‘imposter’
Each time I find the time to write
Never telling who I am, only telling who I am not.

Squawking, sulking in my ear
Drives the pen, the words to veer,
Drives the mind to that of Lears,
Into the sullenness of my volition.
Imposter, Imposter - not a syndrome but a title;

The title of my biography, the world’s class joke
The worlds least known, the worlds last hope.

I have a Saviour but I am my own,
Rather, I insist to be my own.

Hypnotized by the shadow, or not a shadow but a void,
A black void, not empty but falling,
Falling deep and a miss, falling, falling to my abyss -

Imposter Void Imposter, write your sweet nothingness,
I pity myself but I go on, Imposter Void Imposter -
Sympathetic, the abyss lends it’s kiss.

I’m an imposter.

I’m an imposter and no one can know.

I may end up on the street in rags that once were my clothes.

Money isn’t everything,
But being poor blows

And I’m facing the clock.

What then felt like freedom now feels like a box;

Like a long leash
in a big yard
Where the gate’s always locked.

i'm a swindler,
a trickster,
a not-so-great pretender.
i live my life as an imposter
among the scholars that call themselves
my colleagues,
equals.
what achievements? pure luck
what success? just timing
was my effort ever as
earnest
as it could've, should've been?

a stranger wears my face, but with less decay;
in the distance, hidden in the summer’s maize
I see an imposter that answers to my name,
and in rapture he watches as the yellow rots away.
A decade ago, I recall the same.

in the distance, a stranger who seems closer today -
idly, I wonder why I’m walking his way.

These poems I write, they’re my escape,
though from what I do not know.
My troubles seem to evaporate
the moment I let them show.

I write about love, which is ironic
because I’ve never had a lover.
I used to think maybe I was sick;
for I’ve never longed for one either.

I write about death when I’m feeling down
so I can cry to something new,
but thinking to when I lost real tears,
maybe they weren’t mine to lose.

Even now as I write this down
- my headphones on but paused -
I wonder where my motives are bound,
for I always feel like a fraud.