I walk in measured steps, in time, and
the ground knows my weight, even the habits
bequeathed from numberless minds
before me. This is histories’ burden.
Yet there is, and ever has been,
a counter-beat: a shadowed self that won’t align,
that stutters at the sharp edges society has hewed.

I easily fold into the amorphous crowd,
too easily, I reflect, but then I stop
where conformity meets my private dream.
I am myself. I am what others see.
I am the gap between these two truths that flee
from definition, exactly where the social contract makes
its deepest bloodless cuts.
Between “I think” and “therefore”
lies the abyss where freedom begs for more
than mere existence. Culture gives me words
to speak for all occasions, then clips me like
a pampered caged bird who’s learned to love the cage.

I feel the pause, the breath, the momentary tear
in the silky fabric they call “normal.” That’s
where there is another facet that I point inward:
not wild rebellion (though that’s a thought),
but the subtle art of keeping something back,
some private longing, an imagination, a fantasy
that won’t be catalogued or named or known,
for it is another coming to form my whole.

We build community, culture, from carved stones
of shared assumptions, yet each stone contains
crevices where my set of selves remain irreducibly alone.
This is the price: to be both one and many, to think twice
before each gesture, each articulation, reconciling what
is bound in relationality with freedom.
I must choose between the freedoms, plural,
never complete, and the rope of obligation.

The tension will endure
as long as consciousness divides its gaze
between the mirror and the public maze
of others’ faces. Here’s the paradox
not locked: I need the very thing that limits me.
My selves emerge from the weighing
of push and pull, of giving yes and no, of bend
and break in the living. There is no resolution.
Only this dance—step forward, step back,
step into line, step out.

And yet I speak. I try to name this thing
that makes me I, and me, and sets me part.
The dancer holds me close, then lets me go.
My self and selves composed: individual, person, role—
each fragment claiming to contain the whole, totality,
each whole dissolving at the slightest touch
into its parts. Perhaps this is too much
to ask of poetry: resolve what can’t
be solved. But here, between the covenant
of shared language and my private whispered tongue,
I speak in dreams, of something ineffably unstrung.

Here I exist taut between the freedom
to choose my chains and chained to choices.
This is the human knot I cannot lose
by pulling tighter, cannot cut asunder
without destroying what makes me
possible at all. So I remain
suspended in this arc of pain,
this sweet and sour impossibility of being
both the seer and the seen, agreeing
to disagree with our own existence, split
at the root, yet emerging from it,
in the spaces of irresolution,
in the gift of recognition,
in speaking from fractures.

20/6/2025