Strange Love or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Being Naked
I’d rather wear the mask
than listen to you laugh.
How does it feel?
Bob Dylan asks.
The mask is fixed as wax
figures trapped behind glass. But
the me inside the mask can grow,
a garden breaking through the snow,
like Mary’s bells and cockle shells,
the forests of Thoreau.
Can rise and fall like dough.
Can feel a pinprick, feel a rock flicked
towards my eyes or nose.
Can feel an icy, cold wind blow
and whip. Can feel a sun-warmed
river’s flow.
Can feel
how it feels to know
the answer is yes although the teacher said no,
although my mother said no,
although my brother said no,
although my father, my sister, my friends said no
to the question if I am doing okay.
But what else can I expect them to say?
I took off my painted on smile.
How does it feel,
Bob Dylan asks,
to see your real
face, unmasked?
I frown:
I’m not drowning in sadness.
I shout:
I’m not boiling madness.
I’m full.
I’m alive.
I’m teeming with gladness.
I’m an ever-expanding canvas
embedded with motley gifs
and electric guitar riffs:
I’m a symphony
that changes every single day;
I’m a masterpiece
re-presented ten thousand thirty seven ways.
The paint flies and the orchestra plays.
Christina sang it,
I’m beautiful in every single way.
And I can see
there’s both an I and a me:
the one they see, the other sees;
I see them, they see me.
That they see me does worry I,
so I hides me:
for sometimes I sees what others can’t see;
I worries that voicing her views will cause me
to be seen by others as an object at sea—
foreign, distant, stranded, and weird:
a strange little object, one to be feared.
I worries that, from others’ lives, me will be disappeared.
I would rather wear the mask
than listen to them laugh at me.
I would rather wear the mask,
then listen to them laugh at me.
I would rather wear the mask then—
listen to them laugh at me.
I covers me with a mask. Because it doesn’t really matter
if they laugh; it’s only a mask.
But I wonders, is it they who laugh?
Or is it their masks?
Does they covers them with a laughing mask?
Because it doesn’t really matter
if they laugh; it’s only a mask.
How does it feel, Bob Dylan asks,
to hide behind a clown’s mask:
to never hear yourself, or anyone else,
really laugh?
It never matters
when it’s only a mask, fixed as wax
figures, protected from ego-iconoclasts
behind glass.
When I hides me, they both die
a little bit; I is me, me is I.
We’re one evolving symphony,
that sees and is seen constantly.
They was never laughing anyway.
I feel
the weight of being the me that everyone else expects to see
slip away.
They were never laughing anyway.
I take off the mask and I am free:
not forced to maintain that duality
of that outer self
that’s plastic and sticks—
to what everyone else deemed is correct
and agrees with their opinions, unchecked—
and that inner self
that questions—and kicks
itself, fearing its being drastic
by questioning
and hides behind molded plastic;
I sit beneath the Joshua tree,
naked, alone, just I and me.
How does it feel to see you're real?
I feel fantastic.