I remember it best as this: the room was all walls; the grief, an impossible architecture. I didn’t want to leave the room. I didn’t want to leave the room despite having not eaten, I didn’t want to step into February. I didn’t want to leave the room, even though the room was not mine. It was a dorm room, beige territory, flickering bulb, the paint a fractured cartography. It seemed as if there was nowhere that death was not a question of auto-play. Give me anonymity before that kind of purgatory. It was a good day then if I could tell you how long I had had on the same sweats. Even in the memory the ending seems obvious, I am going to fail out of college. At the time this seemed inconsequential, I was going to die anyway. You have to understand; everyday someone was leaving, I blinked and the copper levitated out of the skull, back to the barrel. It’s striking in retrospect, the places we seem to find ourselves before the inevitable. A gun knows its purpose; I envy that, still. Several flies hovered trying to force themselves into the bulb. This is how I know I would make for a poor god, I didn’t have the energy to kill them myself though I wanted to. Instead, I would go back to sleep, summon the energy to turn off the light, I shut down their heaven once it began to inconvenience me. Next to the stream of the people like me dying there were emails that read “Checking in,” “Absences,” “Graduation?” But the videos were all connected, an electric rosary, every new saint stained an iris. I say that the room was all walls, but there was also a window, the window doesn’t mean hope, it means I can’t be trusted with my own erosion. I say the room was all walls to mean: Every door is an obligation. My father’s calls went unanswered. The emails went unanswered. The body went undiagnosed. All of these are my fault. I didn’t want a diagnosis, I had a country already. I didn’t want a diagnosis, because I am convinced a name is something incurable. The letter that told me I was not going to graduate used the phrase “Regrets” 8 times. Outside the window I forget about, the suburb was thawing. The blinds made a beggar of the light, while I started a panic attack; behind my eyelids: February and February and February.

POLICE DREAM #607

Analyze my demise I say I’m super anxious

KENDRICK LAMAR

A fog of mosquitos collides around

the last of the streetlights

Drunk on the idea of a false heaven

a dying moon to bask in

The feeble glow

a second hand god

his own silver moon

shining in his chest

My mother’s pulse aching in time

with my blood’s boastful song

He raises his hand

a country of twitching rivers