Reflections on mirrors

There is one kind mirror in my house.

It's in the bathroom

and I got it out of a skip when I was 19

and furnishing digs in Bristol with a mattress on the floor 

and bookshelves made from planks and house bricks.

That means I have been looking in it for 43 years.

I think that might be why it is kind.

I have retained a vestigial memory of how I looked then

and it reflects that image just faintly.

It may help that it is not well lit

and I do not peer too closely.

Here I am in its first bathroom with a Bizzy Lizzy

and a reluctance even then to commit my face to close scrutiny.

A strange thing has just happened.

I looked up 'vestigial memory,' to see if it was a thing,

and came immediately upon the work of an artist

who was at college with me when I took up skip surfing.

Even more strangely he is referencing Anna Freud

who I also met aged 19 and wrote about here in 2010.

The cruellest mirrors are in department store changing rooms.

You are mercilessly exposed to every possible angle

and lit from above.

Nobody should ever be lit from above.

The cruellest one of all was in the basement of Miss Selfridge.

(I was not there willingly.)

Dazed and confused by the shattering music, the flashing lights,

sudden pools of darkness and milling shoppers,

I veered clumsily between racks of clothes

looking for the exit.

A similarly disorientated woman made her way towards me.

There was an impasse. She wasn't going to step aside.

Wretched woman I thought, as I smacked into a mirrored pillar.