About Lincoln College

The Essential Differences
Jereme Makowski

I walked inside and the house was paper. Backwards entrance, followed by radical change. Cardboard cutouts coasted along and around the walls, contouring to corners in some semi-liquid manner. Photographs of familiar faces were pasted or traced upon these rigid and restless sentries. My cellular telephone rang at that moment, or changed itself from statuesque to pliable. Spurting small darts through the holes from whence sound had since ceased spilling forth. Seismically-tipped needles that caused earthquakes. The newspaper-stock walls shivered for a moment. I fell through a door in the floor and landed upon my air mattress with a “tink!” My bedroom was littered with moist confetti, vestiges of a long-forgotten celebration. The new year was no longer new, so why this ancient eagerness? Why this house of expiration, which yawned and yearned for centuries of slumber? My bed was red then, she had been on her period. Once when she lapped at my legs I told her I could never leave her. But she became too salty too quickly and my skin cells started to shrivel. That always left a bad taste in my mouth. Sort of irony-tasting. And now maybe my cup could be full of her again. The window reached for me with arms of moonlight, shadowy tattoos dancing upon those arms from the wind in the trees. I was embraced and carried up up up up up up up up up beyond the brink of the Caribbean’s furthest tidal reach. Far beyond anywhere her sight could reach. And I glanced down up the countryside through telescopic eyes, admiring her flavor from afar. Always in motion, always beckoning, always tasting of sweat. And I called for my blanket to hide her empty life from me. It swept across me of its own accord, automatic supermarket bedroom door. Where real sleep could take silence seriously. Where I could stop being two people at once.

About the Author:
Jereme wrote this prose poem in his creative writing class at Lincoln College.

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