Displacement

I missed you in bed last night. If you had been there I would have shifted as I always do, so that your head could fit on my lap as I type, situating the weight of my arm along the back of your neck so that you know I am there, but not pressing on you too hard. It was a long day of sitting in front of a low-grade tractor beam, pulled a millimeter at a time into the world’s biggest pile of shit, images of infant corpses and burning hospitals juxtaposed with advertisements for PhD programs on foreign continents, mail-order diabetes medication, and discount ammunition, until I’m all the way in it, trying to dig a tunnel to the other side but finding it useless, so I give up. The radiation from the screen burns my eyes so I close them for a moment and pick up a guitar, but I can’t remember any chord changes, or any lyrics, and it doesn’t matter because my hands won’t move. I look down at them and see hundreds of pencil lines drawn in crisscross patterns from my fingertips to my forearms, and as I look closer, I see that they are not lines at all but gordian worms who, having been seen, begin crawling. I brush them away and realize that I’m exposed, out in an open field, and I know that snipers will pick me off if they catch me in the sun, so I scramble for the nearest house. Inside it smells like shaved wood and industrial cleaners, it’s familiar but I haven’t been there all semester, fuck! I’m going to fail this stupid class, and I didn’t even…