Trying to Know Myself

If as a new born babe
I was a blank page
to be written on

I have become
a note-book, spiral bound
and scribbled on all through.

Do not write off
my crossings-out.
They are the better part of me.

(not so much the roads
not taken, as the by-ways tried,
found wanting,

crossed by others
which I took instead --
or walked back on myself.)

All this is written on
one part or other
of the I that I know

or the me that others
meet from day to day:
face, psyche... heart perhaps.

it's there in conversation,
in writing, on a walk,
in dreams or idle thought.

I'll recognise in some
unguarded moment, threads
long buried, briefly brought to light.

But no one ever was
a blank page
to be written on.

Some things were there
before I saw
the light of day.

Others came as a response
to my environment.
My father's craftsman's hands

did not come down to me --
unless from them came art.
For sure from them:

a strong sense of
inferiority -- today
how flat-packs panic me.

A D.I.Y. refuse-nik,
product of the myths
the family concoct.

So when the small boy said
I'll be an artytett
the myth was born:

my brother was to build
the houses I designed.
(It might have come to pass.)

Was I as would-be artist
damaged, incomplete?
Perhaps - the theory's rife.

From illness and from myth and self-
fulfilling prophesies came
emphasis on inner life,

abhorrance of conformity
and love of books and poetry,
heresy in faith,

dislike of uniform
and uniformity.
The child is still in me;

I feel his impish ways,
his love of the irreverent,
his prompts to artlessness.

Face to face at times we stare
as to and from a mirror,
broken, multifacetted:

a nose, a broken piece of mouth,
an ear, a cheek bone out of place,
and all of them irregular.
.................................

Hobgoblin2011, at dVerse Poets' pub, prompting for Poetics, set us to compose a self portrait.