The Ostentatious Inner Self, poem by Charles Freeland

I’m sure the habit of endangering everything you own and everything you are (a telephone pole repairman, say, or a Mickey Mouse criminal, the kind that boasts of having stolen things he couldn’t even lift) is one few of us would wish to break. If only we were so lucky as to know what it means to be in love that way and not think it a silly aberration. The kind of thing that happens to children when they’ve had their tonsils out.
Or the moon suddenly comes upon them in a clearing. And insists on following them around. The way a man follows a woman into the restroom at the airport. And she doesn’t seem to mind. At least not at first because she thinks he might be something she’s conjured from a textbook. A math problem she’d stumbled on young and was never able to solve. And so it stuck around. It put on weight and began to seem like a human being. If only because it found neglect unbearable. Something so painful, even the pithiest bits of Epictetus were powerless to put a stop to it. And that’s when she understood the shadows cast by others are not merely accidents caused by the angle of the sun. And the height of the person speaking. But signs. To be heeded as if they’d come from inside your own body. Like palpitations, synaptic miscues.