I alone sit in judgment of shadows made and unmade on the wall:
the fact of a radiator between us, father and son, no irony intended.
The heat and sounds the boiler sends out in an ever-expanding series
of contractions self-evident, as if something thick and gelatinous
will be birthed at my feet.
I am sitting this way out of some sense of polite company (imagined, of course),
as I am still alone, ignored, uprooted, and torn—the way limbs from a Douglas Fir
trail out the front door days after Christmas.
I remember how you liked to lean back in your chair and pass judgment on family
and neighbors, the half dozen people we tried to claim as friends.
They were the small minds, the empty tin cans in the recycling bin we thought
we could transcend.
The sneeze in the mirror I catch myself looking into rings out. I need only look
harder to assess the fact that I have a surface.
The evening is complicated with the space I take up. Don’t touch me—and no one does,
clothes collecting at the foot of my bed. In this way, I divide my time between dreams and not-
dreams. The patrolman parked at the bottom of the hill who knows
he will always make quota. The stage between bed sheet and shower curtain grows jagged and
steep,
yet I continue to listen for my song. Do not dance, I tell myself, playing hard to get.
But for you, I have made myself an exception, I am your spitting image on the wall.