eye of the beholder

"eye of the beholder"

Inside the iris, a soft glitch—

not failure, a doorbell. Dust

rings the bell of the pupil: enter,

bring whatever light you carry.

Every eye is a darkroom,

every blink a shutter fall.

You call my freckle a dead pixel;

I map it as a star that never learned

to quiet itself. Same speck, two skies.

Your lens likes the hard-edged truth,

mine drags its finger through the wet paint.

Neither of us is wrong. That’s the mercy.

We look at the chipped mug. You see fracture,

a hairline future of split mornings.

I see a riverbed, mineral and patient,

a place to wash the tongue of the day.

Some images refuse to choose between

wound and water. That’s where I drink.

When the frame tilts, colours misbehave:

violet stepping out of its lane, green

ghosting the edge of a leaf like rumour.

Chromatic aberration, the textbook says.

I call it the soul trying out new shoes,

refusing to walk heel-to-toe for anyone.

In your gaze, the city is all scaffolds,

angles knitting themselves into verdicts.

In mine, windows fog and write back.

Compression noise makes lace out of smoke,

JPEG artefacts blessing the brickwork

with reasons to be looked at twice.

Trust the blur, the image said,

and I do: not as surrender,

but as consent to the many versions.

Your blur is a fog I can swim. Mine is

a veil with fingerprints on it,

names smudged into revelation.

The child squints, invents a coastline

in the static of a late-night TV.

The elder polishes the cataract’s cathedral,

letting light arrive as it decides.

We inherit a thousand ways to see;

we choose which ghosts to feed.

Beauty is not a verdict but a verb,

rendering itself at different speeds.

In one eye, the face is chorus.

In another, it is a single bell.

We meet in the middle distance—

and call that distance human.

So, here: stand with me at the mirror

where mercy pixelates into ghost.

Let our grayscale longing lift its chin,

let nostalgia host our clumsy data,

and in the soft glitch near the iris,

find the world we’ve each been making.

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