The Examination

Listless images swirl up from tangled seaweed. Instead of going home to study a youth stayed on at a topless bar. This reoccurring nightmare is a parody, a Dahliesque floor show of every melting, pants down moment. Unschooled for future-shock, ill-equipped for long forgotten questions; scruffy owls hoot in an empty lecture hall as a mind reacts with a jittery dread. A lost post-graduate thesis rides on a city bus, passengers sit on it as they come and go; the manuscript is deeply buckled with butt cheeks. No time to revise the unprepared. Dimples of anxiety indent a head trip. Despondency envelopes. At any moment, eyes will open above a pool of sweat, then blink stupidly as they have done - often and repeatedly for the last 45 years.