kept awake by caffeine, chipping away
at coffee stores with late-night hours, cramming
(and regretting the having-to-cram,
diagrams and vocab passing
like shadows on rivers, a haze of
scantron green, abcde (and enough
all-nighters to make you see certain f’s), a world where
Romeo and Mersault join hands to sing
of the meaning of life, and random thoughts run by
without ever being caught (love and 42 and logarithms);
all together a virtual barrage
of imaginary words and numbers
streaming by iiiii chased by lines and now shapes
forming history dates, somehow becoming
hiragana and from there spanish sentences in subjunctive, imperfect,
perfect, definite, indefinite (hold on a mind) but still
i wouldn’t have missed Juliet’s death (ha destiny and tortured love, ha essays)
for the world.