The Exam

My eyes swim up from a tangled seaweed of long forgotten data. Now I remember that instead of going home I stayed on at that topless bar. I am unprepared for future-shock, ill-equipped to decipher questions, that like shaggy owls hoot in a darkening lecture hall. I used to panic myself awake at such times but this reoccurring dream has become a parody, a Dahliesque floor show of every melting pants-down moment. I have been dreaming of my post-graduate thesis it rides still on a city bus, where I carelessly left it. Passengers sit on it as they come and go; the unfinished manuscript is deeply indented with butt cheeks.