James Mclain Poet Free verse

Malignant Narcissism

I have studied the mirror
until it spoke back—
not with truth,
but with hunger.

There is an individual there
who does not exist
unless it is seen—
and when it is seen,
it devours it's gaze
that made it.

It's love is a blade
polished to brilliance,
held out as a gift
that cuts only inward—
never itself.

It builds kingdoms
out of other people’s breath,
taxes their tenderness,
burns their doubt for warmth,
and calls it survival.

Inside it,
a child once whispered,
“I am small.”
I am vulnerable, do you not hear me?

But the whisper was buried
beneath monuments of grand design—
stone upon stone
of borrowed admiration.

It cannot bear the quiet,
for silence tells the truth:
there is no throne—
only scaffolding.

And so it fractures the world
before it can reflect on it's self clearly—
distorts, denies, divides—
until even the stars
seem to orbit it absence.

I have measured it
not in cruelty,
but in emptiness.
A void
that must consume
to feel its edges.

And still—
in the deepest chamber
where no audience follows—
It stands before a cracked mirror
that will not speak,
and fears
it never will.

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