I was not allowed to live my life,
so I pretended to be dead
and interested solely in things
a dead man could be interested in:
petrified reptiles,
museum bric-à-brac,
fake evidence passed off as truth.
I felt a great need to be really dead,
and so at all times I wore
a mask made of wood
on which someone occasionally drew,
with colored pencils,
the look of contentment,
impatience, desire, bliss,
or the look of someone who is thinking
about an entirely different matter.