Richard Siken

You have to understand: there was no noon, no down. Time passed. Day turned to night. I woke and slept. I drank, I ate a bit, I slept. There were few nouns. They wouldn’t connect. I didn’t know fan. I kept kicking off the blankets and pulling off my clothes. The people came and went. I didn’t know now, I couldn’t find the latches, and every few hours I found myself at baseline, staccato, returned to tonic. The light moved through its stations: soft white, blur-white, buzz-white, white-white, cream-white, cream, tan, black. My dreams were flickers, my days were smears. I slept in a mechanical bed, three feet in the air. Time and more time. The questions were confusing. I answered in song lyrics and scraps of poetry. Twenty-nine dollars and an alligator purse. It would have been funny except for the yelling. And the fear—the mind that didn’t work, the leg that wouldn’t move, the people who should have arrived but didn’t. I pitched fits; cried jags, hair-triggered—it was neurological, endless. Finally they knocked me out. They clocked me. Soft white, blur-white, buzz-white, white-white, cream-white, cream, tan, black.

I am jet fuel and six miles long. I am bad business. I make the rooms grow smaller. Underneath my shirt is another shirt and under that the cloudbanks clang their worksong. They pitch their weight in droves. This is a cold shelf, Sport. A struck bell. I gloat when I say this. I shine in the frost. You are a ham tied up in string. You are pineapples and cherries and ham on a plate at dinnertime. Fate eats you up. We rub against the facts now. My face is a glass jar. My heart is applesauce and a cold spoon. I clear the decks and spend my leverage. The rest is dazzle. You are an obstacle course and I am a pair of dice. You hop, like a rabbit, cabbage to cabbage. I win by a landslide. I smear the mirror and distort your face. You are the flipped coin and I am the outcome. I don’t decide, I collect; thumbed scale or not. You hit the ground, or so you say. You can’t unknow the facts so you run faster. You, the boy from bruised tomorrow, under the eaves where everything gets put down. I am a lamp, you are a gun. You spend your bullets on a hat, I burn when touched.