Fancy dress and mask wearing are associated with fun but my poems in “Felos ainda serra” are not. I think it goes back to childhood memories of Halloween, but I’ve never really been comfortable at masked functions. Once donned, a wearer has license to carry on in a way completely out of character,or in character but a less pleasant part of it; a non-wearer is at a disadvantage. To take my point to the far extreme, (only to make the point) a balaclava is mask for a criminal.
Apart from the above there’s the mask we all make of our faces when circumstances require it, and for some the mask becomes essential - to cover what? I started writing this with a view to introducing one of those poems but as I went on Janice Ian’s “At Seventeen” came to mind. So here’s the poem and I feel like hearing the song too.
My head is an eggshell
intact, hollow.
Left on the ground
weather leaves its stains;
on the outside I smile that smile
which passers-by notice less and less.
All I can do
is keep widening the smile;
wider and wilder,
eventually grotesque;
they start running,
I am left alone.
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