Faced with a blank page,
The child scrawls faces
Drawn from a small map:
Gods in parental disguise, children, caretakers at the kindergarten.
Inside a circle rimmed by tangled lines,
A vertical line with two small circles at its base,
Two circles at its end, one on each side,
And two horizontal lines curving downwards or upwards.
The barebones of face on a lonely or happy day.
What’s in a face?
Is mine fashioned in an early 21st-century style?
Some expressions are unique to our times.
Take winking face.
As an emoji, that’s a wink too many.
And, so, the 18th edition of the The Chicago Manual of Style alerts:
“the appearance of a given emoji
may depend on a user’s operating system
and may be subject to periodic design updates.”
Updates to quash glitches in the twitches,
improve smirk, unlock premium. 😉
What’s in a face?
Does it shuffle, face down and flip like a card?
Is it borrowed, and can society it take it back?
Is face a role?
Effaced, how does one continue?
Does one die offstage, just like that?
Theatre is a must, isn’t it?
Act or die, isn’t it?
Break a leg!
The other day, like same-pole magnets,
my face and another’s couldn’t face each other.
The mirror reveals no forces
Besides some wrinkles at thirty-three.