Mirror Image

Hateful eyes enshrouded by
a cloak of apathy;
incapable of feeling any
type of clemency
look over at me, challenging
my need to intervene,
for what I’ve seen is nothing less
than frantically obscene:

A mother looming over three,
the children that were hers,
whose cries and wails, a piercing sharp,
all due to long whispers
of voices evil frequenting
her every waking thought,
despite the efforts to subdue them,
they’re ever in earshot.

And so we have a brutal scene
of babies in a tub,
and Mommy wielding butcher’s knives
(and just in case, a club),
as rage has overpowered her
and damaged her frail fuse,
and when her eyes lock with my own,
they thereupon confuse:

Her eyes look too much like my own;
her face is red, mine’s hot;
her left arm raises butcher knife,
and right away I thought:
She’s mirroring my every move,
but then she breaks the trance
to pull her arm back, almost shamed
in favor of a stance

like a hunter or a warrior
who dominates their prey,
her knife goes quickly in and out
like she does it every day.
And at long last when she comes to
and sees the massacre,
our locked eyes fuse since all this time
she’s me, and I am her.

40 lines