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You

By Allison Campbell
Poetry•Vol. XXV No. 2 (Summer 2012)

You are whom I’m talking to. And one of multiple reasons I exist.

Someone is impersonating someone else. You watch the performer and feel the name of the person they mimic itching your tongue. The shadow of the name is sitting comfortably on a bench inside your brain, but it will not stand and show itself.

The impersonation you cannot name is you.

You are the glasses on your head you are looking so frantically for.

You are so close to you, you cannot see you.

I love you.

Still, I do not know you. And even if I got to know you, I would not know you. Only you can know you. “And when beholding the Self, by the self, He is content in the Self,” explains the Bhagavad Gita.

You will never see yourself through other people. If you like yourself, their descriptions will not do you justice. If you do not like yourself, their descriptions will give you a new faith, until the next bump into your shoulder or unfriendly glance.

You are not your toenails [see BODY], but your toenails are you. Best trim them!

The sound of its ring does not make the bell, but hollowed out objects that do not ring are rarely called bells. So it is with you.

You may change your tone, to which some may say, “I don’t recognize you.” They should say, “I never recognized you,” but do not blame them.

You can be thought of as a coagulation of remembrances and hopes with a hard structure to decorate [see SKELETON]. But when your memories float or sink away, and you can’t concentrate enough to think into the next ten minutes, then where are you?

Signs point to you as more than a receipt or dream. But theories about you are either too subjective or entirely without subjectivity. That’s the trouble with you.

You can’t open a door and walk out on yourself.

Even though we don’t know what makes you, you are unrelentingly that.

Allison Campbell
Allison Campbell’s work has most recently appeared in Court Green, big bell, the Pinch, Labletter and Rattle. She currently collaborates on the comic-blog D.Diderot

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