Claw Your Skin Out

By Peter Yacoub for Intrusion II FW21

They say that a mirror is supposed to reflect what you truly are,

Revealing the most intimate version of yourself on the looking glass, 

But why, whenever I look in my own mirror, 

Do I want to claw my skin out?

My mirror never reflects the version of myself that I want to see,

My stomach is lined with rolling hills,

And my face is asymmetrical 

With one side dripping like the wax on a hot candle. 

I ravenously throw on layers of makeup 

To make myself appear less rotten

But no matter how much I cake on, 

My reflector still reflects the uncooked version of me 

My mirror peels back layers of my skin, 

There’s another entity residing in my epidermis, 

Using the looking glass as a portal

To claw its way out. 

Mirror mirror on the wall, 

Why am I constantly ripping at the seams?

The stitches piecing together my framework are loosening,

I’m crumbling apart like a doll losing its stuffing

I’m expiring from the inside out,

Like a ragdoll with soiled skin, 

I must discard the threadbare rags barely holding me together,

And reinvent myself with untarnished porcelain.

So I start to claw, 

Clawing all my skin off, 

Peeling back my decaying corpse,

Until I am a raw pulp of flesh.

I pump fresh blood into my arteries,

Connect the bones of my skeleton,

But instead of creating untarnished porcelain,

I merely amalgamate into another version of Frankenstein’s monster.