Bremarie Gulfan's "My Mask" is about twenty words long, and the one thing it never mentions is a mask. The title promises a disguise, but the six lines offer a split instead: a mind that speaks, a body that forgets, and a voice that carries on regardless. Much of the poem's interest lies in working out where the mask actually is.
The first two lines are built as a pair. "My mind speaks for freedom / My body forgets where I'm from." Both open with "My" and share the same plain grammar, yet they pull in opposite directions. The mind is given a voice, and it speaks *for* something, like an advocate in a courtroom. The body, meanwhile, suffers a failure of memory. That is a small reversal of expectation, since we usually say the body remembers, through habit or reflex. Here it is the body that lets go, as if daily life has worn the past away while the mind holds out for something bigger. "Where I'm from" stays deliberately bare. It could mean a place, a community or an earlier version of the self, and the poem gives no details, so the reader has to decide what has been lost. The verb is also gentle. The body "forgets" rather than betrays or refuses, which makes it sound tired rather than guilty.
The poem has no end rhymes, but it has a sound of its own. "Freedom" and "from" share an opening *fr* and a closing *m*, and soft nasal sounds keep returning: *mind, from, I'm, dreaming, Sometimes, Singing*. Read aloud, it almost hums. By the time the final word arrives, the poem has been quietly preparing for it, as though the speaker has been humming under their breath all along.
The shape on the page does as much work as the sounds. The first three lines run to roughly six, eight and six syllables, with no punctuation at their ends, so they read like one continuous thought. Then the poem collapses into fragments of three syllables, then two, then two. "I just keep on dreaming" is the hinge. The word "just" can sound modest or weary, and "keep on" implies something is pushing back, because nobody needs to keep on without resistance. Dreaming is also not the same as acting. Depending on your mood, the line reads as resignation or as stubborn survival.
The last three lines are the most intriguing. "& Always, / Sometimes, / Singing." The ampersand feels casual, like a note jotted in a margin, and it makes the poem seem to continue a thought that began before the first line. Then comes the contradiction. "Always" and "Sometimes" cannot both be true, yet the speaker puts them side by side, each on its own line, each shorter than the last. One reading is that the wish to sing is constant but the act of singing is intermittent. Another is that the song is always there inside and only sometimes audible. Either way, the poem admits the gap between what we intend and what we manage. "Singing" is also the only word to get a full stop, and it has no subject. The "I" has dropped away, as if the song has become something separate from the divided self that produces it.
So where is the mask? The poem never says, which seems to be the point. Judging by the text, the mask might be the forgetful body, which blends in and keeps quiet. It might be the dreaming and singing, a pleasant surface over the mind's harder demand for freedom. It might even be something that can be taken off. The word "My" suggests the speaker owns it, and perhaps chose it.
What gives the poem its force is its refusal to tidy any of this up. Freedom is spoken about rather than achieved, and the hope on offer is small, uneven and persistent. In a handful of lines, the poem shows that a person can be split and still sing, even if only sometimes.