She looks at herself in the mirror.
What she sees is distorted by criticism.
Everything admirable stands erased, unscrutinised.
She makes of herself a caricature.
Reduced she cries at her mirror-image.
A haunting alienation, a misrepresentation, she has no idea who this woman is.
Who created her? And why is she never finite?
Why can she never be felt? And why is she so angry and frustrated with herself?
She can never get there, not like this.
Her hands stumble across her body, terrified, inspecting.
And she can’t feel a thing.
Only thoughts surface, words on her skin, attacking what should be a fortress.
This is not coming from within, it’s stuck, an intruder.
She is disembodied, reconfigured, unlike her, a massacre.
Due to one voice, a million, that do not belong there.
Everything about her is a close-up from without.
She is a surface pregnant with corruption and oblivion.
In every room is a mirror.
In every room is a ghost.
And the haunting men, not all of them, outside her walls,
But she carries the most destructive one within herself and he does not stop,
Does not let her go until she does.
RECITAL BY STEFANIE HIERZER ON YOUTUBE
Croque-Melpomene 