I open the door and everything hazes,
lamplight fading to big and bigger ghosts.
My room’s unchanged, posters still hung,
notebooks flipped to half-blank pages. I worry
about similarity, fragments made universals,
a boy in a bar with nothing but a suitcase.
He’s there for a moment but the air is warm.
He knows that’s enough, living someone’s life.
When the drugs don’t work, pick out a bar. Wait
until waiting beats leaving. Leave when the waiting’s
not enough. Whole life of cliches. Tasting strangers
in the parking lot. Yearning for the city. Scouring the bedroom
for the visage of another life. Everything in threes.
Beginning. Middle. End. Reindeer bobbing
in the windows. Sun setting on suburbia.
The doors getting small, small, and smaller.
The boy with nothing to claim but a notebook.
The walls and posters collapsing into essence.
Everything caving in. He’s running out of pages.
And running and running and running.