The Better Half by Peter Magliocco

In the half-life between old age & death
I wait for the one who’ll punch
my ticket to Palookaville — or a better place
than here, whatever homestead conceives,
what comes like my cloned self
to ravish a vanishing mirror image?
Surely deep narcissism is bereft
of that love another must bring,
so deliver me from mistaken identity.
Bare all that matters to see,
making us the whole of the other
in the half-place between ourselves
we’ll know the forbidden flesh

of what dares to be
neither you
nor me.

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