The Voyeur

 I look at the desk with a Z in the center I will write my first poem on someday.  I crack open my algebra book, unsure what to study. I crack open Cool Joe Thomas’ Biology book and take notes on selected pages I will never be tested on.  That night I prop my leg up and make a cup of instant coffee. That night I think about Renae Howard. . I wonder  how I can go about telling her that I think about her all the time even though I go to a high school in the shit side of town.

That night I will try to sleep only sleep will be denied because of pain. Sleep will be denied because of light. Sleep will be denied. The night somehow I can peep in her blinders. Somehow they are ajar and casting a breath of shadow against the wall. Somehow I can see her, The girl with the blonde hair who was rattling her tors while I was watching her dance late at night.

 

I should be sleeping. I should be resting. I should be supplicating to whatever deity there is getting ready for the Regional meet. I wonder what my life would be like if I could go to Notre Dame with beautiful long-haired ashen skinned girls in checkered skirt. I wonder if we would read the books Coach Mann is always alluding to while arriving to the locker room after school and busting my ass with the fastest cross-country team in the area code.


She is wearing jeans and shirt with a giant capital M plastered in the center.  She is writing. There are no text books. I am waiting for any subtle movement. My lights are off.  I intermittently peer through my own blinds staying just far enough to the right so that

 

She is writing. She has her legs forming an upper- case A  into her breast. She is tilting her head. It looks like she  might have been crying. She is writing  She is quilling her pen across forehead of white paper, inking the thinned-veined flesh of the page with streams of emotion. She is tackling the page. It looks like she is knitting with one hand.  It feels like she is trying to blue the tip of the pen into the vacuous socket of the page.
 
She is beautiful.

 

I can’t stop staring at the college girl next door knowing that she does not know I am looking at her.

 

I can’t stop wondering about her world.

                                             

I can’t stop looking into the window. I should be studying. Precipitously I balance my left leg on the side of the bed three years earlier my father used to kneel down as we would barter prayers every night. I can’t stop looking at the enlighten square.  I can’t stop looking at the

She is still writing.  She has been writing for over an hour. Perhaps she is journaling. Perhaps she is channeling cursive sentences conveying her romantic disdain. She has her blonde hair up in a pony tail. My leg hurts. I am still balancing precipitously on the side of the bed.  Every subtle shift of her anatomy I inch closer. 

Then it happens. She is breaking free from her body.  She sets her notebook down like an overturned mortarboard.  She rises. She stretches, I have been paralyzed for  balancing precipitously with a shit appendage on the side of my bed for ballast. Then is happens. She gets up and arches her back, her arms forming a Y. Her neck looks around her head like a trained otter. She then lowers her arms and crosses them near her waist, alighting her shirt like a drape. Her skin is white. I can see the silk hyphen that is the back of her bra. Before I know it she is tucking her stomach in, pinching at the center of her jeans, shaking the lower part of her body slowly like a mermaid kicking out of a pair of fins. Her panties are green. I have never seen a woman wearing mismatched underwear before. She stretches up and out again. There is a mole on her back that looks like the state of Rhode Island. She is facing my direction. It is like she is cognizant of my adolescent pining ever though she is completely oblivious of my presence. She places both her arms behind her back, her elbows jutted out like burgeoning wings. She is facing my direction. The bra releases itself in a silk tumble. She holds it like a defeated albino eel before carelessly tossing it the corner of her room.

 

Briefly she snaps at the back of her panties. She is still facing my direction.  At first I think she will be entirely naked. At first I think she will lower the tip of her panties availing the inscrutable keyhole to some other world.  Her breasts are bulbous, ivory orbs floating below her chin. Both nipples seem crossed eyed and staring at me at the same time.

 

I continue to balance on my bed.

 

The girl takes off her pony tail holder. She traipses across the room again, this time in slow motion.  When I see her coming back to her bed I notice that she has been wearing her socks the entire time.

 

She snaps at the back of her panties once again as if swatting off a wedgie before slinking into the top of her bed, the vertical rectangle I have been peering inside of like an advent calendar hushes into a socket of blankness.

 

The lights are off in both are bedrooms. She is ten feet away from me, segregated between cheap domestic ply-wood domicile constructing architecture wearing only her panties.

 

I wonder if the tops of her fingers are traversing near the center of her anatomy.

 

I wonder if she is trying to enter herself.

 

I wonder if she feels all alone in life.

I wonder if she needs someone to hold her.

I grab the crinkled numbers belonging my cousin Todd Brooks.

 

It is three o’clock in the morning. I have an hour and a half before I need to before my father will wake me up for the paper route.

 

I leave all the lights off in the house. I skulk through the kitchen past the refrigerator.

 

I head for the door.