Perfect poem. @timgreenwood First verse invites the reader to the problem or topic. It is a clue, but it is not. That is the targetting sentence, repeated as a title of a poem. ‘Look again, if you lost attention.’ So the first comment of such topic is wisely reminded in the beginning. Someone might too fast jump to conslusions. Easiest interpretation there is: that girl is a mother or a feminine relative as close as mother. She cannot comprehend that the reflections define her and her interiority - body does not express her at all. Or the understanding of mirrors tells her, she could do better ‘all of it’. Recreate it all, set a new
start.
Tormented and lost and defiled
I love those words. ‘Torment’ is very uncommon, ‘lost’ abused and lost people are everywhere out there, but they don’t really use it, if they are truly lost, ‘defiled’ is perhaps an euphenism for a word ‘rape’. If an author uses those three in one verse and it is followed by
too many times.
It means, in the context of the first verse of four paragraphs, the heaviness of being that girl and being closely related and responsible for her is a heavy duty. Most probably, after some time when this girl became woman and now she is a senior, a spilled milk or water on a floor is a ‘rape’ or being ‘defiled’. I wonder what were the true examples of experience for usage of such words. They could be almost nothing, but they were too heavy, since the environment and life context must have been ‘not nice’ (*).
She’s an angry machine, unable to reason.
Reasoning hits back a person, when reason must conclude and terminate many mirrors/options. Anger arises and objective sensitiveness (might be an obligation from the very beginning of life of anyone), so the person is entangled in paradox of demand/expectation and that drives the rhythm of the word ‘torment’ used, according to the little girl. And the whole life of this girl, since poems are not pure creativity. There is always a real source of creative result. Or just a pinpoint of being of a person that creates.
Nobody knows where.
She knows. Other people receive the outcome of her being or just her as she is alive.
Don’t expect any sympathy for she has none to spare.
Don’t expect grace for she will kill you on sight.
This little girl has memory to spare and the mind of a shark.
Stone cold and violent, she is coming for you.
That’s a story, I guess, of the anger and rationality again. The ‘shark’ is on the opposite side of ‘grace’ and ‘sympathy’, just because she needs it. So the ‘entaglement’ must be of some sort just endless. That is more than a simple drama, that might be the thorn in soul for life.
There is a little girl in this house.
I don’t know her name.
She is here to kill me and I cannot recall why.
I’ve given up hope, reason, and have no last request.
I’m hungry and lonely and starting to cry.
Why won’t she care? What more can I do?
She is standing in front of me with an unmoving eye.
I might have wrote that earlier, but this is a relation of, maybe, no ending. This bondage cannot be just cut as it is. But it could be also all the way around - just the feminine part of the author towards the father or something similar.
(last paragraph)
Yeah, that is a mother. A good spell wrote after her death.
It is not a comment, just maybe a deconstruction of your poem.
Perfect one. I will save it in google notes so is always in my phone.