We all live with ghosts.

They are the people we see through,
pretending they don't exist.

They may be in our house,
on the bus,
or in the next cubicle at the office.

We sit beside them in church,
at the ball game,
or in the darkened movie theater.

They walk their ghost dogs
past the neatly trimmed edges of our front yards.

They beg for money at busy intersections,
talk to themselves in the line at the grocery store,
chew their mac and cheese across the dinner table,
or  huddle in city shelters on cold winter nights.

We walk through them.
Seeing them would acknowledge too much–
that there's more to us than we know what to do with,
that we are lonely, afraid, disconnected.

So we say we don't believe in ghosts.
We pretend the house in inhabited only by one,
not by dozens of ghosts,
longing for recognition.

Text and image © 2012 by Dirk deVries. All rights reserved.