(Blazed into the full lull of a soundscape: the lame hysteria of the cars, the parks, the intersection traffic lights, the basic headaches of the whole damn affair, carousels in order yet unsound, motion pictures and their soundtracks: it cuts back, flashes, edits you out of it; outside, still the shuddering brakes and jet fuel streamlining across the evening and into blatant disfunction, decapitating the night one cloud at a time then stopping, then starting, then leaving, again and again: yet another hour, it passes.)

———

You wake, if you wake, only for a moment. And when you do there are no more loud noises.

This night of phantasm is bleached.
Run over and through with drowned-out colors.

The car’s still parked where it was but the meter’s run dry.
You walk away from it and wrap your finger around
The hole in your pocket, trying to remember the words
           You were going to say only an hour earlier.

On the other side, the train tracks rattle
And the green hills roll over the city,
So you walk on and wade into hesitant sobriety,
Unsure if that’s the word for what you’re becoming.
Only certain that there’s a different kind of awareness
Surrounding you now and that it appears unkind. 

The dream lasted longer than you thought it would.
Now it’s a strange feeling and you know that you should leave. 

                       And for a second, leaving makes sense.

The piercing’s been pulled out, leaving a stain on the ground.
You look at your bloody stump of a nose ring in the mirror,
Taste the copper and iron on the tip of your tongue,
Breathe a little slower than you did before – more carefully now
           As the needle drops on the radio,
                      as it slips slowly into your ear and fills the room. 

With every step you feel your age, although that could just be your head talking. 

But with what is there left to feel?
           With what else is there left to think?

You’ve let your life function as a dream with only a little more consequence,
Yet here you are, deprived of the dreams you needed to make peace with.
          Instead you creep into the daylight,
          Never suppressing the urge to be consistently leaving. 

             It’s better to pretend you never had a choice. It’s already happened.

                        But I wish I wasn’t ready.

You walk into a diner and sit alone, red-eyed and starving.
There’s only a cold cup of coffee according to your wallet.
You shiver towards the bathroom floor and tilt against the mirror,
Hoping that the stranger with sharp pupils will finally look you in the eye.