Breathing In Your Face Poem by Patti Masterman

Breathing in your face, it's nearness always a distraction:
And once you found out, that you had to go on existing
And could not avoid becoming an Ego, an Identity;
You were terror stricken, realizing you had somehow missed the lesson
And now it is not that you have too many identities; it is that you have none
And so you had to keep trying them on for size,
Like a legless man always daydreaming,
Staring through the prosthesis store window;
But he has no stumps even, to attach the fake legs to
Because he was born deformed, legless, lacking that which, from the start
Everyone else seems to have been given almost as an afterthought.
So that all his fantasies are mere masturbations, and in the end
Only make him more ashamed.
Time, the heartless fellow, just keeps running ahead of us
Trying to better his time, with each round.

And you knew that you were doomed, to be a fake;
Have always been a fake, and for some reason,
You've never been able to understand why,
It is something that provokes shame; but that's the only genuine emotion
Now left to you; out of the apparent richness
That is visible in the windows, and in the high-rises,
The penthouse suites glittering high up, in their holy airs.
A beggar, a pauper, in the midst of plenty;
A deaf-mute in the realm of the emotions,
Miserably stunted and shrunken inside
Failure stamped; though still provocative enough
To inspire a bit of derision, and occasional deprecating imitation-
And you know that your kind will always be just another
Too-soon tired of and discarded plaything
In the ungentle hands of the world.