Masks

Masks is a poem about the masks we wear and what it means to take one off, in your own eyes as well as those eyes around you.


    There are four stanzas of eight lines each. Every other line rhymes (the even numbered lines which have 6 syllables), the odd numbered lines have 8 syllables. I've presented this poem two ways, once as "4 paragraphs" and then once in the more traditional poetic tradition (where the lines are split into 8 and 6 syllable structures, with the rhyme at the end of the even numbered lines). This means the table of contents contains two sections - section 1 is the 'paragraph presentation' and section 2 is the traditional presentation.


    In the traditional structure of four stanzas, each has been maintained as four chapter breaks, but each stanza has had its lines split-apart in order to preserve the intent (the pacing) of each line, and thus each line may be given its own page; there may be instances, however, where managing the evolution of the poem in your mind, some lines have been split into multiple pages, or, multiple lines of a stanza remain on the same page (making it so a chapter is not necessarily equal to the count of lines of a stanza).