‘Complete,’ a New Poem by Jason Ryan Morton

Here’s a new poem by my Facebook friend, Jason Ryan Morton, whose work I’ve looked at many times before. This one is another one with a happier theme–love. Again, I’ll put his words in italics to distinguish them from mine. Here’s the poem:

I ran into the mirror
Fell right through
Woke up without eyes
But could see you
You were brighter than the moon
You smiled I swooned
Kissed your lips with my finger tips
I wrote our love sonnet
Upon your flesh
Awoke with a Memory
And a belief
That today we may be strangers
We will meet one day
And we shall be
Complete

And now, for my analysis.

Note the relationship between running into a mirror and seeing the person he loves. When we see a mirror, we see ourselves, of course; but mirrors can be metaphorical, too. The mirror in the Lacanian sense can be a metaphor for the face of another looking back at you, an idealized version of yourself, or an idealized parent looking back at you, mirroring your love back to you.

The Oedipal relationship with the idealized parent gets transferred onto someone that one later falls in love with. The poet “fell right through” (i.e., in love) and “could see” his love “without eyes,” because as we know, love is blind. His love was “brighter than the moon,” the same moon that was envious of her maid, the sun Juliet, for being far fairer than she (Romeo and Juliet, Act II, scene ii, lines 2-10).

Another indirect reference to Shakespeare can be found in the poet having written their “love sonnet.” They “will meet one day/And…shall be/Complete.” This is the lifelong drive to attain the idealized state of the object seen in the mirror (the “Memory” from one’s first childhood experience of looking into the mirror and establishing a sense of self…a repressed, unconscious memory), to try to be as perfect as the image one sees on the other side, with whom one feels a stranger. To have one’s love, projected into and embodied in that other person.