A mirror is supposed to settle who you are, but here it only raises the question. The speaker of this untitled poem looks at "the average person looking at me through the reflecting glass" and still sees no one they recognise. The word "average" matters. The face is ordinary and easy to read, and that is exactly the problem, because it has nothing to do with the "inside of my head." The subject is a longing with no object, "for something you never had, but you don't even know what it is," together with the gap between a body others can see and an inner self nobody can reach. The central idea is that this ache is larger than any single person or loss, even when a particular "you" drifts through it.
The poem opens as a dense block of prose, and the shape suits the content. The sentences run on and loop back, and the speaker's own questions, in lowercase quotation marks ("what could this be?", "is this body all I have got?"), break in like thoughts that won't be quiet. One small physical detail carries a lot. Other people look "down at their feet" while the speaker is "fixing my glasses up to the crown of my nose." Nobody meets anyone's eyes, and eye contact is the very thing the speaker wants, someone who could "touch the intangible parts of me, and yet do not scare themselves away." The fear is not only that no one will reach out. It is that reaching out will frighten them.
Then comes the line "This bleak nothingness that amounts to nothing, it consumes me -". The tautology is deliberately empty, and the dash cuts the prose off. What follows is scattered free verse whose indentations make the words fall down the page like the leaves they describe: "It shreds / like leaves / In autumn." The poem's one clear rhyme, "hues" and "blues," appears at this point, almost sing-song, as if the speaker grabs at pretty sounds while everything breaks apart. The imagery then slides from autumn leaves to "azure blues" to a "hailstorm," so that even the sky is falling, and it ends in a heart made of "glasswork."
That last word links to a pattern running through the whole poem. There is the "reflecting glass" of the mirror, the speaker's glasses, the glass heart, and finally the window and its sill. Glass lets you see something while keeping you apart from it, and it shatters. It is a fitting material for a speaker who is looked at but not seen.
In the second half a "you" arrives, and the poem moves by chaining words together. "Eyes" ends one stanza and begins the next, and "window" does the same. It is how memory works, one image snagging on the next. Verbs of leaking and flowing run through these lines too: "poetry escapes through your tears," the tears escape through the eyes, "rivers flowing," hair moving with the wind. Everything gets out except the speaker. The suggestion that poetry is what escapes with the tears is an interesting one, because it makes the poem itself a kind of overflow.
After all the lofty natural imagery, the plainest simile arrives: a smile that "snap[s] me apart / like a rubber band." The comparison is domestic and almost comic, and that makes the hurt feel real. A rubber band is stretched before it breaks, and "you pulled too fast / too hasty" suggests the speed of the stretching, not cruelty. The next image is stranger, as the two of them "flipped out through the crevices in the window sill," squeezing through gaps far too small for people. The poem seems to be talking about an escape here, though I'd read it as an inference rather than a fact about any real event.
The final line, "its not about you its about myself this time," has no capitals, no apostrophe and no full stop. After so much figurative language, the plainness lands like an admission. It sends us back to the mirror, and the phrase "this time" hints that the speaker has told the story the other way before. The lost relationship becomes one chapter of the longing and not its cause.
The poem is worth reading because it never names what is missing. Even the title, a row of asterisks, declines to label anything, just as the speaker cannot. The shape on the page, the repeated glass and the final turn inward do the work that an explanation could not.