Picture in the Closet

I am watching studying observing
a type you can easily capture but never understand
because I am hidden.
The validation I sought you could not offer.
Smiling under a hat, shadowed and shaded grey
acceptance of others means (never having to say you're lonely) no strangers to condemn.
Make sharing my struggling self worth the effort required to sustain love as an abstraction.
I am your projection screen, your perfect celluloid fantasy of yourself, reflected back
a million fold.
I am crystalline color and cinematic cliches
submitted for your approval
in place of emotion, instead of
dangerous unchecked damning passions.
Desires which might be crushingly denied, rejected, negated, deflected
or worse and more ruinously
collapsed into harmless, cute.
Give me the space to dazzle you,
display me though I'm not in the frame.
What does it mean to only want the impossible,
the improbable?
Is it only fear of the death hiding in imperfection that makes
a fantasy better than flesh and fact?
I collect you
dusty forgotten fragments of memories--
moments when desire almost assumed corporeal form,
secret questions were silently answered,
and for an instant I was barren
of metaphor.