Cut While Shaving
Cut While Shaving - meaning Summary
Existential Dissatisfaction and Continuity
The poem presents a resigned meditation on alienation and the sense that life repeatedly falls short. A voice lists how people, art, love and death are "never quite right," framing human existence as a series of unsatisfactory lives piled into history. The speaker responds, observes an unchanging mirror moment, then moves down stairs into an ambiguous continuation. The tone is weary acceptance rather than solution.
Read Complete AnalysesIt's never quite right, he said, the way people look, the way the music sounds, the way the words are written. It's never quite right, he said, all the things we are taught, all the loves we chase, all the deaths we die, all the lives we live, they are never quite right, they are hardly close to right, these lives we live one after the other, piled there as history, the waste of the species, the crushing of the light and the way, it's not quite right, it's hardly right at all he said. Don't I know it? I answered. I walked away from the mirror. It was morning, it was afternoon, it was night nothing changed it was locked in place. Something flashed, something broke, something remained. I walked down the stairway and into it.
Feel free to be first to leave comment.