Nice. You have good instincts.

Let me begin with something painfully obvious: poetry is different from prose. Maybe it's annoying to find such a seemingly banal comment presented in a serious critique; I do so because, while you are definitely thinking in terms of poems, you still have a bit of prose to purge from your writing.

Consider why we resort to prose: to explain, to describe, to narrate, to argue, and to organize hierarchies of importance, both temporal and psychological. All these features imply a subject that is served by the words. No finer medium exists for this task than English prose.

Poetry then, is all the other stuff. None of the elements we associate with poetry—rhythm, rhyme, assonance, consonance, enjambment, scansion, all the various forms—are concerned with subject. With poems, language is focus, first and last. No poem gains entry to the canon by virtue of its subject, or for espousing a particular political sentiment.

So my suggestion is to comb through your lines and be vigilant for any constructions that you suspect are serving the purposes of prose. I’m not about to rewrite this for you: for one thing, it’s not my poem; for another, you’re perfectly capable yourself. However, you might take a hard look at phrases like when I see you; You ask me for; I look at you; and I stand on the sidewalk; I will never get used to watching. No doubt a argument could be made for the inclusion of any of these phrases, or all of them. You should refrain from making that argument.

Behind the measured words and logical, step-by-step presentation, a poem like contains an experience, one that had a deep impact on you. What poetry can do that prose cannot, is to evoke that experience in all its raw emotion, its lack of logic, its sense data devoid of the interpretive sheen of conscious thought. It’s the difference between merely telling us about an experience, and placing us in the middle of it, making your experience ours as well.

Why I suggested a closer look at those phrases is that, for the most part, they’re redundant. We know this is your experience, that if a thing is thought, you are doing the thinking; if it is seen, you are doing the seeing. Every time you bring yourself into the text, you are resorting to the language of narration, making yourself the point, rather than letting the language of immediacy bring the experience itself to the front and placing a linguist buffer between the reader and the moment.

This poem weighs in at 126 words. As you said, it’s a short poem. But perhaps not short enough. I’m going to suggest bringing it in at 100 words. It will take more than simply eliminating this word or that. You’ll need to rethink your language and discover what you are actually trying to convey, line by line, and discover the most economical way to do it. Perhaps that means tossing a line altogether and finding an image that does the work for you, with fewer words.

One thing you might discover is you cannot tell us everything you now are trying to convey to us. You may need to abandon the narrative structure and instead leave negative space to give us room to interpret for ourselves. Then, if you want to get really ambitious, carve another 25 words from it. "But it won't make sense," you might protest. Perhaps not prose sense. But that's a good thing.

This feels like a strong first draft, where you allow yourself to identify the terrain you wish to cover, the issues implied, and the approach you will take. Now you need to refine it, and hone it into a sharp poem.