Your face ripples through
the poems I have written.
And you do not have the patience
to construct yourself
word by word,
joining
each dot and line,
a (logical) progression
in a manuscript of old poems -

rejected many times over
by literary magazines,
occasionally published
in nondescript
small town
community journals -

your face contained in my syllables
on cheap, mass-produced paper.

You call yourself a narcissist
and refuse to read verses
birthed to render you in poetry.

I call myself a poet
and refuse to stop weaving
this web of you around me.

We are contradictions
of our self-proclaimed identities.

Pity,

my words fall
on trained ears,
under objective eyes,

and you are lost to the interpretations
of strangers.