"You're looking at yourself all wrong."

I tried, but I could not
avoid the slip
of 'the look' I give to those
who prompt the silent stoned contempt
when I think "they do not know"
even as a tear of mine
slipped
as if to compromise
the pain

of me

of me and him

and my reflected attitude.

He caught it

and he caught the tear
sliding down the slip-n-slide
of the hollows
of my eyes,

pitifully raccooned.

I told him I tried everything.

Regenerist, and skin bleaching
creams and ointments
cucumbers
sliced to make my eyes obverse

"Ridiculous"

I'd finally said.

"I'm simply dying before death--
decomposition evident
underneath my eyes..."

"This--" he grandly swept a tear
from the purpled eyeball sling
inverted just beneath sadness.

My eyes retort: futility,
but my friend, he took my tear
and licked it from his finger, said:

"Tears."
(as if I needed tests)

He spun me to the mirror then
and told me take a long hard look.

"Don't..." I answered in protest.
He took my head between his hands
and told me
"open up your eyes"

and "looooooooooooook."

so held captive, that I did.

It was painful
in bright lights
to look at veins all broken by
booze and cigs and bad habits.
Excruciatingly
my eyes--
I stared at them and compromised
looking at what was beneath...

Then his face was beside mine.
"You're not what you think you see."
In the mirror, next to me,
his finger danced a delicate
swoop beneath my relics of
the audience of all my love
fortune and misfortune both--
I met his gaze and then he spoke:

"They aren't circles, now, are they?
But commas underneath the eyes."

I nodded--they were comma-like...
"These hollows, they are justified."

Then he whispered in my ear.

"Tears" he said, "they do not 'fall'--
they drip, they glisten, they...elide!"
I watched him smile then, as I smiled.

"You're the writer--you tell me--
look again--what do you see?"

Dark circles held the pain of me
and again, I could not speak.

"Nacre.." he nodded to me.
"Mothers-of-the-pearls of these."
I laughed at him, his fingering,
pointing to his own young eyes.

I looked down, he took my chin,
and lifted me back up again.

"Look." he said, commanding me.

"Your pupils are black pearls of depth,
surrounded by the blue of light
that comes from deep inside of you--
and no cream replaces 'fight'
side-by-side with tenderness.."

My eyes became a cliche' pool
as they watered up his words
and spilled a waterfall so fast
his fingers could not catch them all.

"Why must you be gay?" I asked,
laughter breaking, just like waves...

He looked at me so serious.

"Why must you be not?"

He put his privacy away and asked--

"So, how'd you like a butch mohawk?"

"Thanks, but no, I'll stay the same--
just a trim today," I said.

"A 'trim'???" He gasped, and winked at me.

"What will you think of next?"

* * *