Cosmetics

Poetry | Christopher K. Coffmann

We can wear make-up to hide / the disorder: cells collapse

and die. Foreign ones invade. Skin 

sags, muscles 

atrophy.

Boltzmann reminds us 

that we tend to entropy, 

but we call it abjection. 

In this, Pythagoras again gestured 

to the symbola. He ruined the word 

before its world was born, his theocratic 

if … then 

made manifest as an inharmonic 

interval.

We were in the hands of a sensibility 

that shuttled between hermetic 

elitism and mere bean counting.

If cosmos

is beauty, 

we can only ever fight ourselves, or be ugly, 

and uglier.

Our home is the uncanny. 

If he takes off his masks,

the disorderly apparition 

will terrify

because he looks so much 

like me, and so much like you.