After

It’s been a while since I studied.
I mean really studied

The books sit on a table that isn’t even mine in a foreign room
But I still read
Sometimes my own poetry
Sometimes yours
I realize its edges are yellowing and it looks like one of those old withering photographs
Or a flower so falling off its stigma
One touch- disintegration

The words are old and decaying and it’s quite miraculous that it’s only been a year.
Since then I’ve replaced the images in my head with real ones
And these new images are so sharp and bright, and sometimes painful
That they’ve replaced the need for poetry
Or really, it’s just that they’ve taken over any room to create it

I come home exhausted, forgetting really what it is I dreamed
Creating newer, simpler dreams
I hope she goes to her group today
I hope we can decide on a discharge plan
Let’s not have to call a code today

My stories fill up rooms with laughter, sadness, and overall amazement
And as I tell them I feel myself growing bigger and less tied down
like a balloon
Stories get reconstructed, dolled up and shiny, like a Hollywood starlet
or those bags of fake gold you get as a kid after taking that field trip to the gold mines

And I find myself asking to go back to the dream
That original one
The student one
While I get dressed and ready for another day
And at work one of the patient’s looks up, smiles, and says “Thank you”
And there’s no bigger dream in that moment than wishing that was enough
And that this image could replace last nights
In which she was strapped to the bed in restraints
and she cried out to get the fuck off her
as the janitor picked up the broken pieces of porcelain
and the children lucky enough to be on the other side of the fence
ran after the ice-cream man