Dancing With My Shadow

Miss Eva's pipe tobacco smoke is thick in the air.
The tea kettle whistles from the small kitchen.
"Listen boy, here comes the six-fifteen.
It always whistles at the crossing in Hartford."
"Clackity-clack, clackity-clack"
comes the heat in the radiator
of her retirement apartment.
We sit and dream of days past.

Miss Eva lived by the railroad tracks
for sixty years before her family
moved her to Florida with other retirees,
to slowly decay in a tenement thirty stories high.
A tear slowly traverses the wrinkled face.
"Things were better when I was a girl.
I had family and friends who came to visit."

I wonder what she did before I was forced
into weekly visits as part of my probation.
I wonder if she danced with the shadows
she tells me keep beckoning her
onto the narrow window ledge and to freedom.
"Come closer" they say.
"We will free you from pain, old age, and loneliness."

Miss Eva's pipe tobacco smoke is thick in the air.
The tea kettle whistles from the small kitchen
"Listen boy, here comes the six fifteen.
It always whistles at the crossing in Hartford."
"Clackity-clack, clackity-clack," comes the heat
in the radiator of her retirement apartment.
We sit and dream of days past.