Objects Refuse My Name
—A Poem of Solipsism, Time, and Withdrawal
by R. Jay Hoffman
Because I couldn’t type
deliberate and precise—
the keyboard rejected my rhythm.
It wasn’t me speaking; it was the cord
curling under my desk like a molting snake.
My fingers were merely an event
in the timeline of plastic fatigue.
I told myself I was confused.
But it was the glass of the screen
refusing reflection,
not in malice—
it has other work to do,
absorbing photons, refracting rooms
where ambition is drowned
by coffee rings and open tabs.
All of my life I thought I was central.
But the blanket, not I,
waits for morning.
It is a surface of dreams
folded and forgotten
until it becomes an archive of sleep.
What I called boredom
was the sound of time walking past
in wooden floorboards,
creaking not for me
but for themselves—
a reminder that nothing rests
even when I do.
The seasonal disease in my chest
was not a symbol of weakness
but a kingdom of molecules
enacting governance
with or without me.
My coughs have their own meaning
in the spittle’s arc,
the bathroom mirror
never bothered to interpret them.
I thought: I anguish, I wait,
but the blanket is not mine.
The air does not console me.
The chair has borne more burdens
than I will ever name.
I am surrounded by objects
that outlast me,
ignore me,
and exceed me.
Solipsism taught me that boredom
was a failure of novelty.
OOO whispers: boredom
is the refusal to see
that the world swells
with interactions I cannot enter,
that time is not a void,
but a passing, a presence,
a sovereign thing
which neither loves nor leaves.
Time does not tick for me.
It wraps light around stone.
It deepens the grooves
in the cast-iron pan.
It vaporizes worlds
not in judgment,
but in cosmic indifference—
a long, slow exhalation
from the belly of a star
that never knew my name.
I await my fate in a blanket
that is also waiting
to become a rag,
then lint,
then dust
in the gullet of some galactic tide.
I once believed
that disbelief made me clever—
a maker of ironic grins
in the slums and gardens
of my own design.
But now I sense
even the rusted fencepost
has more resolve than me.
It doesn’t need belief.
It oxidizes with dignity.
I name nothing now.
I only notice:
the drawer clicks shut.
The bulb flickers and dies.
The spoon, cold and exact,
sleeps in its ceramic cave.