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Page 33

Even filled with words, this page retains
the blankness of one mirror facing another
across an empty barbershop. I mirror you,
and you mirror me, an infinite regress,
losing itself in repetitions with or without
fractal variations, as when, looking into
a lover's eyes, one sees (still thinking
oneself one) their gleam resolve into
a tiny reflection of one's own face, and
in that reflection sees or imagines one sees
one's own reflected eyes reflecting
her face, whose eyes...but here vertigo
intervenes, for one knows not vertigo
from here.

I must create you to speak to you,
for you are not here as I write
these words -- unless I put you here.

[Most of the candidates for hereness
are not here and have been gone
since I started punning, if not before,
and so, dear reader, dear toy to which
I've given a name and a personality,
dear imaginary lion whom I address
as I perch upon my childhood toilet -- and so
I must create you, hoping that your
you-ness attracts a co-creator
to become it, to receive these words.]

You must create me in order to hear me,
for I am not with you to speak them
as you read. Am I serious? Joking?
Ink can't joke, can it? Ink can't sing
an ancient incantation.

(Well, some type fonts are silly, some
as solemn as a procession of priests.)

But mostly I am your creation.
It's all your fault. Now don't ask
for a share of my royalties. You've created me
greedy. (I wish my royalties were commoner.)

I have nothing to say. The mirror has been
drained of reflection. It is a glass half empty.
And yet, mirrorly we roll along,
role after role, playing.

Note: Line 6: A repetition with variations can be as dizzying as a mirroring, as in the chaotic near-repetitions chaos theory's finds in coastlines and cloud edges and in the geometrical patterns called "fractals".

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