The next stratum of furniture
The next stratum of furniture I move stacks above the guardrail and I can’t see the doors across the atrium at all. I clamber over what is left in front of the door, turn on the light, hesitate, the voice still hums. The form isn’t moving. The curtain bulges in more detail with soft square edges like broken limbs. Hello. Why did I wait so long to speak back? I don’t speak to empty rooms, sometimes not for days anywhere. Nothing. Just pulling the leading edge of the curtain away from the tile I slide my head in slowly. A silent tumbledown column of bedding, cushions, and towels fills the tub and limply offers a drapery hand over the curb between porcelain and oilcloth. Mandalas on the bedding of felled cypress clearings burned so black as each shivered in funereal drafts everything in my eyes was swelling with an empty white light. It made my face ache like daysleep and my eyes dry and the wall of furniture where the front doors were and the wall still whispering to me, louder now, I am disoriented and breathless in a rhythm of words that repeated like a chant, I don’t want to be, I don’t want to be. Between the two identical walls of furniture I rear back. All paths are the same, all accidents but I choose and throw myself into one rickety mess that topples into the sunlight like powdered milk on death rattles floats. The television in the room sings to me, a chorus of women and men that I ignore, that I can’t help but ignore. My limbs hurt and my lips are bleeding onto my tongue. A lumpy long form is bound down in the center of the impeccably made bed I dream of in the final moments of each night of sleep, when I sleep in the summer sun frozen with panic of this failure. I fold my arms in some sagging arch over the furniture scree, put my face in my hands, the sunlight skin red, and sleep.
