I can see your feet dance the word "welcome" when I squint my eyes and look to the east. You're not quite there but the phantom outline of your own private two step is and the heels click when you shuffle wildly from side to side. You are cheerful here, in this place.
I think of you only during the holiday season—the time of year that you called tasteless as you strung tinsel and those horrid green and blue lights across our apartment's stairway that smelled like piss and hard liquor.
Tasteless.
You used to say that we all had a right to be here, that we should strive for happiness, that the drudgery and sham of our modern age was just a game of charades and the trick was to be the best at make believe.
Well.
I call your bluff, though your words are pretty enough in gesture.
Yes, I call it and I call it loudly because you disappeared into the crumbling walls at the first hint of happy—hid somewhere with the rats and termites that the exterminators couldn't quite kill and sometimes at night I hear you scratching messages into the wrong side of the wall—
Pig Latin Morse code all dressed up like you and singing your song.
