02-28-2025, 02:13 AM
Version One
You Cannot Tell Who You Are Until It’s Who You Were
You cannot tell who you are until it’s who you were.I look in the reflective surface of my soul;
seeing time, emotion, evolution.
I am able to decipher my past,
Or so I say.
Sometimes, during great moments of clarity,
I can find myself and my meaning 15 minutes ago.
I get so incredibly close to understanding my present self—
Defining what makes me, me.
The dictionary lies on my shelf,
Discarded, forgotten, masked in a veil of dust;
It understands what's within and has oh, so many words to characterize itself.
Still, I have yet to find a word to define me.
Who am I?
I have convictions entombed in glaciation,
Yet springtime melts my frosted obstinacy.
I weave a cocoon of icy expressions,
shielding me from greater evils than Helios.
I am a moth and a butterfly in the same very moment.
Inside, I am the library of Alexandria,
But alike, I am susceptible to flames.
I rise from the ashes, not a phoenix,
But a burnt, misshapen bug bringing no more frigidity.
I am priceless, yet everything—has a price.
I could sell myself, piece by piece;
Make a million while losing everything that truly matters.
Please, I beg of you,
Reduce me to a number;
Each aspect of my being has been binary.
Anything extraordinary is simply an outlier,
For I am basic, and my purpose is dull.
I have been encoded for the exploitation of my own self.
The ones and zeros sum up my being—whole.
01001001 00100000 01100011 01101111 01110101 01101100 01100100 00100000 01100111 01101111 00100000 01100001 01100010 01101111 01110101 01110100 00100000 01101101 01111001 00100000 01101100 01101001 01100110 01100101 00100000 01110100 01101000 01101001 01110011 00100000 01110111 01100001 01111001 00111011 00001010 01001001 01110100 00100000 01100110 01100101 01100101 01101100 01110011 00100000 01110011 01101111 00100000 01101101 01110101 01100011 01101000 00100000 01110011 01101001 01101101 01110000 01101100 01100101 01110010 00101110 00001010 01000101 01110110 01100101 01110010 01111001 01110100 01101000 01101001 01101110 01100111 00100000 01101000 01100001 01110011 00100000 01110100 01101111 00100000 01100011 01101000 01100001 01101110 01100111 01100101 00101100 00001010 01000010 01110101 01110100 00100000 01001001 00100000 01110011 01101000 01100001 01101100 01101100 00100000 01110010 01100101 01101101 01100001 01101001 01101110 11100010 10000000 10010100 00001010 01000001 00100000 01100010 01101001 01101110 01100001 01110010 01111001 00100000 01110000 01110010 01101001 01110011 01101111 01101110 01100101 01110010 00101110
Translation:
(I could go about my life this way;
It feels so much simpler.
Everything has to change,
But I shall remain—
A binary prisoner.)
That’s how the writer of this poem feels.
You can’t blame them for the way everything went down.
Although many may say the writer and I are the same,
the ones and zeroes do vary;
I am not the writer of this poem.
This poem represents who I was,
but it’s only a singular moment in time—
frozen down to a few words.
It’s been time since I’ve written this,
and if you were listening, I already told you:
You cannot tell who you are until it’s who you were.
(This version got a lot of feedback about long-windedness, over-explaining things, and using unnecessary figurative speech. I chose to turn the "I have convictions entombed in glaciation" and "I am the library of Alexandria" stanzas into a completely separate poem and just got rid of the second stanza.)