The Others

Sometimes, I wonder if
(between you and me)
There’s a third, we do not see.

That person, whom you think you know,
Or whom perhaps I imagine you to be
Hidden in an imperceptible gap of reality.

For when I clink my glass to yours
(I could swear) there’s a moment’s pause,
In which the one you think you are, slips right through those unseen doors.

For when you tell a joke of which
I don’t approve, but laugh anyway,
(I do believe) someone leaves, even as the rest of me stays.

And when you greet me do you find
Just that part of me you don’t really mind,
The same you say you love, but don’t, well, not nearly all the time?

Is that why when kids break glass
They say instantly ‘it wasn’t me’?
As though there could be someone else, someone there, implicitly?

When a badly dressed woman in clothes far too gay
Hits the road in the middle of the day
I want to ask, was there someone else in the mirror this morning, what did she say?

And when a couple unkisses and unbends,
Winding up on the counsellors' couch,
"I never knew him" she whispers bitterly, and aches over every sigh, kiss and touch.

"Was none of it for real?" she asks him,
and he has nothing to say.
For he wasn't there, it wasn't him, but then again it wasn't her, it wasn't they.

Who are these Others,
Who slip between, into the crevices of you and me?
Who haunts the incompleteness of being?

Look at yourself hard, if you succeed,
There's two of you,
Being seen and seeing.