Waking Life

Waking Life

It was not hot.
He was not cramped in bed.
The bed covers on the upper bed had not been changed.
There was no upper bed.
There were no erratic bursts of cool air.
There was no persistent groaning of the ceiling fan.
There was no sweat on his brow.
There was no early half-dark.
There was:
no light lit all night long.
Sunlight pouring through the window.
no smells of spices in the air.
Outside cars were
less steel bowls of fish.
No man with twenty three chickens trussed by their legs to each other, surprisingly docile.
Sudden smell of overflowing sewage or mosquito spray.
No beggars rested in the shade of a dusty tree or a well-placed stoplight.
No dust not honking.
Street-side vendors hawking their fares.
There were no men carrying stain no stacks of files not in a line.
rising in the air.
No rickshaw pullers resting on their rickshaws, cloth wrap
Heads.
None smoked a solitary cigarette scrubbed from the day’s wages.
Nobody harassed the passing cars.
There was no shelf of bug-eaten books. There were There was no screaming in the other room. There were no arguments in the kitchen.
Lizards sitting sedately on the wall. There were no scurrying cockroaches.
Breakfast was not on the table. The chairs were not plain polished wood. The Internet was not slow. The cab.
Tangled sweeps and whorls of twining wire. Pages were not torn.
Green in the corn
Thing. Absent: clean bedspreads, cell phone contacts, calls from those guys,
idle romantic day
err not there. Walls were straight.
No grey cement. No brick walls red with blood and garlic. No rags for every dream.
good writing, the oil bubbling to the top in a thick layer. The blanket was not stitched. The walls
were not tile smooth. The toothbrush was where he left it.
Here was cold. Here:

Home. Far away from it all.