The real self? February 18, 2013

 

 

(This is my first attempt at analyzing this poem – which I don’t think is as accurate as my second attempt)

 

She talks about who she is or was or should be, trying to step back in time, perhaps, to evaluate where she has been and where, perhaps, she might be going.

There is something in the flavor in this poem of her 2003 poem about altered priorities.

She is wiser now than she once was, street wise, though seeming to know that the person involved in “the game” is not who she really is either.

She seems to want to get back to the person she was, but can only get glimpses of it, that person possibly that she was before she got sucked into the game so long ago.

This is a moment of reflection, looking at herself in the mirror, not to determine if she is the most beautiful or most powerful, but rather, what she actually is, who is this person she sees looking back at her, and why is this person so different from the person she thought she would become.

She has been through all this before and will likely go through it again.

But these moments come only when she is stable enough, “a chance to balance.” A time when she is not teetering in one direction or another or reacting to some stimulus that has put her into a state that is too hectic or unstable for reflection.

She is a woman of many masks, and she has been putting them on and taking them off for so long she seems to have lost herself, accepting the masks that hide her inner self from the world without as who she really is, when they aren’t her at all, yet she has to live with the consequences of their actions, those things she’s had to do in order to project strength, needing to act out the role each mask dictates, as if in a Greek tragedy, she playing role of hero and villain, seductress and seduced, the apprentist or the mentor, though none of those are who she really is either.

None of this is new. She seems to be living her own version of Ground Hog Day, repeating the same routines over and over, if not quite exactly, “the same all the same” as she puts it, as if nothing has or will fundamentally change, and she might as well throw herself back into the game again, even if she doesn’t know who she is, even if she really doesn’t care anymore.

This poem suggests that she isn’t going to change, and perhaps wouldn’t know how to change if it was possible.

She seems to be looking back at a time when she thought she had a better handle on her life, nostalgic for that person who may have been her real self.

This is a very sad poem about a woman who has lost herself in herself and has no clue as to how to get back, how to find herself among all those mirror images, all those superficial masks she had put on to protect her inner, her real self, and now she can’t tell which is which.

 

 

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