Looking at a Dead Father on a Bookshelf

To drive through this casual dementia
is a fragile dizziness at 3am posed like a manikin before you.
Only the limbs grow cold and itchy in the air conditioning.
Oblique are both the whims and wants
of half-ambitions doused in sleep.

When you have exhausted the metaphors,
and everything sounds like an exhaust pipe,
there he is, high up on silent pinewood –
A framed face that cares little of the poor lighting,
(why frame his face and not his trousers?)
and that never looks you in the eye.

Could you have said that the light
slants no more than you do?
It is what it is,
and perhaps you are now
only what you are not.