Tuesday, August 25, 2015

Mimic


I chose to write this incident as a poem so I could play with words, but if I had written it in essay form I could give you more sensory details, nuance, and you would laugh yourself as silly as I did so many years ago when this happened.

In the Squinted Eye of the Beholder
We sat in the restaurant across from one another,
my back to the window, the sun’s glare in his always suspicious eyes.
“Scoot to the left,” he requested, squinted and shifted to the right,
mirroring our lives, me leaning this way; he leaning that.

He interrupted my expressed opinion with one of his own.
“Must be something wrong with that guy. Lean the other way.”
I complied as he compiled reasons why the loon outside was nuts.
“Crazy! I can see it in his eyes; he keeps mimicking everything I do.”

He never saw things my way; and I rarely saw things his, until
I turned around and saw the crazy, frowning knucklehead in the window
making the same expressions as the guy across from me...
hexing reflections of himself on a sunlit pane of glass.



Do you write free verse poetry?

7 comments:

Bookie said...


This is great! Captures a moment we all have had at sometime or another.

Pat Wahler said...

Sounds like me when I pass a windows. I do a double take to realize that chubby old lady walking beside me is...well, me.

Pat
Critter Alley

Merlesworld said...

I once walked into a mirror, I didn't know who I was.
Merle...........

Connie said...

Ha! This is great. Very clever. I have had moments seeing my reflection in a glass window and wondering for a split second or so who it is that I'm looking at.

I do occasionally write free verse, but I more often write verse that is rhymed and in meter.

Val said...

Heh, heh. I don't write free verse poetry, and I've never mistaken my reflection for another person. However...I once got lost in a Dillard's department store at Battlefield Mall in Springfield, Missouri, because they had a circular kind of layout, with mirrored walls all around. I don't know how many revolutions I walked before I escaped.

Tammy said...

Hee hee! This reminds me of the time my dog saw himself in the mirror and growled!

Susan said...

Ha ha ha Was that Bill? Susan