Self Portrait as Waluigi

 

I leave my body, and return to it the same, but different

each time it prisms back onto me.

 

Show me who I mirror, mirror.

That's the point, right? to be defined

by the person people reflect into you.

 

If you know me a frame, you can call me mirror.

If you walk through me name me door.

Refract me into what space you need me to fit

and I will stay there until I am moved again.

 

At times this body stays still and the world

shifts around me oil to water; blood to oil;

in a life I ran cross country; picture me

 

shorts and sweat and blotched skin.

Define me by the identities that make sense;

then I was young and assumed

 

how this all of me lives.

I ran with a group of myselves;

lets name a group of people your age a collection;

 

lets call an action an item; lets say

I was left and so I must be lost.

Running in a group is called a purpose

 

and so when I was left behind I became an effort.

It is no effort to figure out who I am

without knowing how I have lived;

without knowing how I have ended.

 

Ending defined by yelling.

Ending defined by shatter.

If my life is framed by whomever looks at it

 

what would I build if not a place where I can hide.

If a person is described by what they have

reflected into them,

 

what can I find in myself if I prism.

A life as bad skin.

A life as bad hair.

 

A life as square jaw, square shoulders,

boxes of bodies with no room in storage.

I was left to my own devices

 

so I ran eight miles on my own until

a man yelled me into light beams for his losing

of me. I stopped doing cross country

 

but I still run away from what hurts me most.

The track coach said the pole vaulters were suicidal,

which is true but not in the ways in which he joked.

 

A prism defined by what stays inside of it,

a hunger defined by what it needs to quell,

a wind emptied into the esophagus of me.

 

If someone wants to define me by what I refract,

then prism me into infrareds;

prison me out of this gender;

 

prism me into something framed by a horizon.

Something unreachable, somewhere where

the yells are named whispers

 

and the foot fall is followed by itself,

until the horizon becomes itself a comforter,

and the sun tucks the body into bed around it.

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POEM IN WHICH I TRANSITION INTO WATER

 

& you’re everywhere to me / when I close my eyes /

it’s you I see  / & when while that’s well and good

my body doesn’t yet sprawl horizon across itself yet /

doesn’t yet flow out from me in a way that holds itself /

but holds onto itself moreso than necessary / how hard /

it is to take a bath / when you are the bath / when I close

my eyes / I too see myself as I want / I am want to believe /

in the reality of my liquid self / how fluid I must be to fill /

the shape of containers placed around me