TumbleDweeeb

Mirror, Mirror

Don’t ever look at their workspace—
   Shows you too much process or not enough mess,
     Or worse, in every way, the wrong kind of chaos.
  Every draft, every revision—
    Every crumpled page, every saved_file—
  Breath, tempo, conviction, the way they pause.
    These are all the things you either desperately study,
      Or pretend not to notice.
   Though you swore you’d stop comparing,
     They keep creating anyway.
   It’s like a rehearsal with two understudies,
     One memorizing lines, the other forgetting them—
       And then it becomes an audition,
        For truth or lies or standing ovation—
         Until the mirror cracks from looking,
   And you realize you were always,
    The only one in the room—
      Writing your own lines.