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You

You'd like to believe you're at least a few pegs above the other. You'd like to buy into the lovely idea that all the pretty colors you see plainly in your mind, all the ways you're right are truth. I think I read in some dusty scientific journal that the human mind processes criticism differently than praise. One giant festering prism swings sluggishly in the mind readily accepting even the most insincere description of the self - batting away the most honest until you are left with something like a glamour shot of your soul shimmering in glory - absurdly transparent.

I always think I'm of the more self deprecating nature...that I'm really honest with myself that I see the mud and the flies. And that's when the magpies swoop in. And my eyes are stuck to the thumb tack; to that tiny backward reflection of my refracted self in their eyes�laughing at my attempts at self confidence pointing to the ways I cover up my tracks behind me blindfolded with my eyes half shut.

And you pull the wool from the other half and you see the murderer, the lech, the fickle opportunist and that gangrenous spot where your envy resides.

There is a mirror traveling somewhere through the maze of storefront windows in New York. It is one of only a handful of "true" mirrors in the world. Constructed in such a way it can honestly tell you the way you look, the way the world sees you, the way your right eye is lower than your left, how your lips sag, how you slouch how you are a bag of skin and bone and misdirected assumptions.

And when you look into that mirror you are shocked at the lies you have told yourself. The malformed humanity of "you" the grey matter and the blood and the fifty some odd years of accumulated being, of trash, of rot, of poring into the emptiness that is eternally empty. And you have shed all the lies and come to face the ragged field of flowers and thorns and decaying rodents that is you.

And as you walk away the lies return like so many swatted off flies

And by tomorrow you will breath them, eat them, be them again.

And by tomorrow

You will forget -

1:47 a.m. - 2004-09-01
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