The Madman, The Artist, The Discrete Separations

Thinking hard
about how best to remove
my memory of my face.

Is there a miracle cream?
A scalpel?  Chip at it
with a mason’s hammer?

No.

Find a camera, preferably
an old Polaroid
and an endless stack of film.

Take shot after shot, from all angles,
of myself,
by myself in an empty room.

Or, if possible,
find someone who loves me
to do it for me —

then ask them to leave.
Hang the pictures up
in neat rows on the blank walls
and study them

until the “self” disappears.
Only see then the bones, the pores,
the tiny blemishes, the leftward bend to the nose.
Drowning in reflection, I’ll soon forget

that this is a “man”
I know, and become lost in the flow
of errors and mistakes, of the ugliness
once so easily subsumed in a glib blur
I have called “my self.”  Thus

compartmentalized,
the wear and tear
will be all I see when I look in the mirror.

Just another batch of ruins in the crowd.
Another answer to my ego:

look, look, at the failure of coherence!
Imagine the freedom that will come
once I see only the pieces
and stop believing I am any one thing.