I always have books on my bed. There they lay, blinking up at me saying,

we don’t shift or move, we speak it all at once.

I reach for everything all at once.

I’m sick of journeys and spelling globalization a hundred times before we finally begin to talk about poverty, just when the classroom turns into its hollow cave of echoes and long past queries.

These things on my bed box me into a train car that gently sways back and forth, always going North and South

but never picking up a soul.

My blankets, constantly entangled, trip me and I awake in a sweat, each drop trailing down my cheek

sliding onto my lips

caressing my tongue with sadness,

confusion,

cigarette-stained living.

My sheets are intoxicated with empty embraces, torn up pictures of faces and scrawled out letters that ride the night air and tap lightly on his window.

The paper flutters gently and evenly, gathering an image of him sleeping

later to plunge into my throat so when I breathe

I ache,

when I sing

I break like a radio tossed into a pile of Grampa’s leftovers, dusty and dazed

not fully able to understand the past

feels like a damp blanket,

warm but chaffing my stability.

My eyes crawl backwards and put on their shells and shut down into auto-nothingness

so I lay next to my books,

one hand fingering the yellowness into the pages so that at least if I’m pretending today was yesterday

some proof will cite this inevitable madness.