My doppelgänger was once a playmate

Who’s since grown into something that scares me.

Beyond the looking glass, my alternate

Provides me with a glimpse of fatality:

I would be just as helpless before fate

In another world – opportunity

Would have never shown itself, and I’d wait

For a rescue just as desperately.

Yet, my mirror self isn’t one I hate

Or reproach; we’ve both roots in tragedy

But where I got doors, she got a locked gate

Escaping that life is a lottery.

You win? You’re diaspora, tasked to sate

The hunger of a liminal country

And must send cash and kisses to abate

How, through the glass, there’s chronic poverty.

I fortune-tell my future: a blank slate

I scry my reflection’s: it’s misery

She is trapped while I got to emigrate

I am mortal, she is mortality.