The poem’s real subject is stated in its fourth line and never softened: “I’m a fool, fading / for never declaring / my love for you.” Everything else is the shape that admission takes.

Shadow governs the imagery, and the progression is exact. First the failure: “I never dared to push my shadow into the full sun, / never reached a zenith.” At solar zenith a shadow shrinks to nothing directly beneath the body — the moment of maximum light and minimum shadow. Never reaching zenith means never standing fully in the light, which is what a man who kept quiet has done. The title’s pairing of silhouette with zenith holds that contradiction in two words.

Then the shadow returns transformed: “When I’m a black sooty silhouette on a red brick wall, / who will remember / as the rain washes me away?” This is the poem’s largest gamble. Sooty human silhouettes on masonry belong to one event in history, and readers who make that connection will find the personal regret suddenly measured against something enormous. Whether David intended the echo is unknowable from the text. What is clear is that the image works on its own terms too — soot on brick is what remains of a fire, and rain removes it. A man reduced to a mark that weather can erase.

“I belong / in the ruins / of my silence” is the finest line here. Ruins implies something was built. The silence was not an absence but a structure, maintained over years, and it has collapsed with him inside it.

The two-line question in the middle does something the catalog rarely permits: it declines the theatrical option. “Should I wail? / Flail with remorse?” The rhyme is almost comic, and the poem’s refusal to answer means it goes on without wailing. That restraint is the difference between a poem about regret and a performance of it.

“Risk the fall / or miss the view” compresses the entire dilemma into six words and connects back to the opening fragment’s cliff dive, which is the one thread linking the two halves of the page.

The final couplet lands on a slightly mixed image. “Stays silent in the curtain of life” gestures at theatre — a curtain falls, a curtain conceals — but the phrase doesn’t specify which, and after the precision of the shadow imagery it reads as approximate.

The confession at the centre is the most direct thing David has written, and the shadow imagery organising it is genuinely well built — zenith to silhouette, light withheld to residue washed away. “The ruins of my silence” is a keeper.

Two problems keep it from scoring higher, and the first is fixable in five minutes.

The page opens with material the poem then disowns. Four lines of imperatives, a one-line lament about people who live in a phone, and then a note saying the rest has nothing to do with it. Read charitably, that’s a poet showing his desk — a thought set aside before the real work begins. Read as a published post, it’s a false start that a reader has to climb over, and “It’s just me” reads as a message to an editor rather than to an audience. The phone lament is a decent seed for its own poem and does nothing for this one.

The second is the brick wall. The image is powerful and it may be borrowing power it hasn’t earned. Setting a private failure to speak against the visual language of mass atrocity is a very large scale for the feeling in question, and a reader who catches the reference may find the poem overreaching rather than deepening. It’s defensible — soot and rain work without the historical layer — but it’s the line most likely to divide readers sharply.