A self-deprecating sonnet I wrote

House of Mirrors

A bare bulb flickers, swinging overhead

Outside its light the deep'ning darkness lurks

The floorboards creak and whisper words unsaid

And everywhere distorted mirrors smirk.

At every turn confronted with myself

I'm ugly, twisted, broken in these mirrors

I'm disassembled, lying on a shelf

I only hope I'm not as I appear.

I've built this house of mirrors to divine

My fatal flaws that must be overcome.

But there is no escape from such a shrine

Imprisoned in reflection, I succumb.

My eyes are always inward, self-obsessed

So selfish, it's no wonder I'm a mess.

Once again, the ability to fluidly rhyme eludes me and I devolve into browbeating pseudo-emo loserpants poetry. To summarize: I just get so frustrated by the way I am constantly thinking about myself. Every action I take is filtered through a lens of "will this make me look less like the loser I am?", and as a result, my interpersonal interactions are bogged down in this self-obsession. Ironically, on a meta- sort of level, getting so hung up about my gross self-absorption as to spend all morning writing a self-indulgent sonnet is one of the more self-absorbed things I end up doing over the course of a day. I just can't win. My ego will most likely implode and form a black hole at the center of my being any day now. (I offer this metaphor with apologies to any cosmologists among my readership who actually know how black holes are formed, unlike me.)

Basically I just need to get over myself, but you, dear readers, were probably already of that opinion.