A hall of distorted mirrors is a joke everyone is in on. You step up to the glass and laugh at the stranger wearing your face. Balachandran V's "Mirror images" begins with that easy amusement, then turns the joke around until it is hard to say who is laughing at whom.
The first half is a catalogue. Seven lines open with the same word and close on the same one: "A squat me / A fat me / A looong me / A twisted me." The repetition works like a row of glass panels, each line the same frame with a different warp. The adjectives do the bending. "Squat" and "fat" are short, heavy words that sit low in the mouth. "Looong" is stretched across the page with its extra o's, so the spelling itself is pulled out of shape, as a body would be in the glass. "Stretched" returns to the idea at the end of the list, but "shattered" pushes past it. A shattered reflection is no longer a funny shape. It sounds like something has broken, and the poem starts to hint that the subject is more than glass.
The most interesting line in the list is "A me I think me." It comes fifth of seven, wedged between "twisted" and "shattered", and it gets no more space or dignity than the others. This is the version the speaker believes is the real one, the self carried around in the head. The poem gives it no special status and makes it one more image in the row. The looping phrase (me, I, think, me) shows how slippery that "real" self is once you try to pin it down.
Then comes "Suddenly-", the dash cutting the word off from what follows, and the mood shifts. The images "begin to speak" and "raise a finger." The gesture could be a scolding, a warning, or simple pointing, and the poem doesn't say which. What they say is "I am you you are me," printed without a comma and repeated. Without punctuation the words run together like two mirrors facing each other, where the reflection repeats endlessly and you can't tell which is the original. Even a small grammatical wobble, the plural images "and says," seems to fit, because the many reflections merge into one insistent voice. Whether the slip is intended or not, the effect is the same.
There is no rhyme anywhere. The poem is free verse, and its music comes from repetition, short lines, and the sudden stop of the dashes. The lines shrink as the poem goes on, until almost nothing is left: "I hide a smile -" and then "They too..." The ending is the poem's best move. The speaker doesn't argue with the images or flinch. Hiding a smile could mean embarrassment at being caught, private amusement, or the quiet pleasure of being recognised. The ellipsis then leaves the sentence open. They too hide a smile? They too are laughing? They too are standing at a mirror, looking at a distorted version of someone else? If the reflections have an inner life like the speaker's, the roles can be reversed, and the person at the glass may be the distortion.
The phrase "my favorite stall" matters here as well. The speaker has come back by choice. Someone who loves these mirrors isn't frightened of being squashed, stretched or broken in them, and that gives the whole poem its light, almost affectionate tone. The recognition at the end feels more like complicity than horror.
The poem is significant because it takes a cheap fairground amusement and, using plain words and almost no punctuation, makes it carry a real idea about identity. No single version of the self is the true one, and the unflattering, fractured, overstretched versions can't be disowned, because they say "you are me" and the speaker's smile half agrees. The humour keeps the poem from becoming a lecture, and the unfinished last line leaves the reader to look back into the glass.