“Masquerade
Behind my mask of silver and gold My identity is hidden well No one sees past the masquerade The beauty of the mask puts them under a spell They get lost in swirling patterns Of crushed velvet in midnight blue In a trance and blind to the truth Tears run down my face like morning dew But no one notices The pain that I bear Because I still dance in circles With the moonlight in my hair And the mask on my face Is where it shall stay Because my life is a masquerade And it fools the world every day”
– Satsuki Sep 2014 (Hello Poetry, 2017)
Applying a Gold Collagen mask to my face, I felt a little like CP30 from Star Wars!. The mask is quite slimy and kept moving as the shots were taken. This felt the same as it does when my daily mask slips a little and starts to show who I really am. I do not like this sensation, it makes me uneasy and feels very risky.
“Sometimes it’s not the people who change; it’s the mask that falls off.”
– (Nancyjohnsonsmith.com, 2017)
My true emotions and expressions beneath this mask are hard to read. The eye slots are restrictive to both see out and in. The mouth slot is very limiting. The mask moulds to my face, so it picks up some of the muscle movement below it.
The gold mask is symbolic of the masks I place on every day to face the world. Sometimes it slips. Would you recognise me without my mask? Will you celebrate who I am, offering me support and encouragement to be myself unmasked?
REFERENCES
Hello Poetry. (2017). Mask poems on Hello Poetry. [online] Available at: https://hellopoetry.com/words/mask/ [Accessed 12 Nov. 2017].
Nancyjohnsonsmith.com. (2017). Losing Our Masks – Shifting Our Relationships | Nancy Johnson Smith. [online] Available at: https://nancyjohnsonsmith.com/losing-our-masks-shifting-our-relationships/ [Accessed 25 Nov. 2017].
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