Sebastian Schloessingk

            DENOUNCE


When even your photo face stops working.
The jaw-rehearsed direct-with-hint-of
face that’s seen you through thirty years,
a thousand snaps (cocky in the curtained
booth, unquailing in the sofa group),
starts failing of its magic. You’re just as
gross and high-coloured as captured mid-fuss
by your wife’s device or someone.
(Only your mirror face with its saving
mobility stands by you.) It dawns on
you, sinking in, that ‘I think I look like
this, I think I look like that but I look
like the fucking other.’ You tell the brother-
in-law in the pub - an aside of toneless
ill-comprehended force, as the holiday
pics skim through lively, smartphone and beer mats -
‘I don’t know that person, and I don’t want to
know them. Don’t know anybody like that.’