No Mirror Required

"He starts to see the / death of the only mirror he / has ever used."

Right at this point is where this poem began to interest me - the concept of mirroring and the bond it forms between people, or how that bond falls apart in its absense. I'm afraid I didn't spend enough time with your poem to entirely get beyond the emotional dissolution you were portraying, but if it were my draft, I'd be excited enough to start the next version focusing a little more on how people grow apart, and why, counterposed with what held them together in the first place. As for the language, the sense of depression seems overdone - a few words go a long way when you want to convey these feelings. I'd back off a little bit on the strong language and instead find a way to make the imagery speak more directly, setting up the emotional impact of concepts like "loathing", "belittling", "tattered" or "skewed". As you move from the abstraction of telling us what the feeling is, and instead pull the feeling out of us by crafting imagery and building the situations into concise lines, the emotional power of your inspiration will build down to the strong closing that you've already found for the poem. I think you have something really good to work with here Rene.