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?