Bed 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.