I know I have stayed awake too long
when I can no longer see any lights
coming from the frat houses,
when I can no longer hear voices
breaking the silence outside my door,
when I can no longer think clearly,
although I’ve forgotten if there ever was a time
when the opposite of that was true.

He tells me to read chapter twelve,
and thirteen,
and fourteen,
expecting that this will expand my skills,
but I wonder when he expects me to apply them
if I’m spending so much time studying others.
I hear something about a frost at midnight,
but my mind is still processing the previous raven,
or maybe I’m now confusing that with a recent conversation
shared ironically with a human combination of the two.
There was some loss of his insight as I quickly scrawled
the last nine lines of a creation I would have to put off
until much later, but ah! Now the time has come.

Still forty pages left to read in a purple book of stories,
being put off because I have my own story to share,
one that already fills over twenty volumes.
Once upon a time there was space to breathe,
there was a separate day and night before we discovered
that there wasn’t enough time spent awake to check e-mail.
So we began an evolutionary process,
causing our offspring of a thousand years from now
to wonder how we ever found time to sleep,
and why we needed it anyway.

My unconscious starts to get restless, wondering when
it will have its opportunity to come out and play,
giving me snatches of odd dreams lingering and waiting.
The voice of my forty-eight-year old mother starts rapping:
Five o’clock in the mornin’, where ya gonna be?
Is it her presence in my mind that makes me feel guilty
for working on Sunday’s task before Thursday’s?
I can think of no other explanation for the stress I deal with,
except that maybe I like A’s because of my name.

Nineteen was too much, then I added six more,
just so I can have three months of freedom to write
before I follow him to California and struggle to pay rent.
A hundred grand of melon-colored money spent
that came from deaths and childhood homes,
paying for the object I am sitting exhausted in front of,
the plain walls that surround me, the environment outside me.
The smart ones go to better schools,
the rich ones live in better houses,
and they are both dreaming of easy futures.
Only the architects and artists slave with me,
but none of these people ever stop for a second
to wonder about the black sky that surrounds them,
or to experience the points of light shining above,
or to feel the power of God’s darkness,
because there is no time to pause.

I search for Vivarin
then associate it with the summer
and stop looking.

This is the result of eight-hour days,
of pressure and time constraint and technology
that lied to us all and stole our free time
at some point when we were trying to figure out
how man could possibly create a machine-made virus.
This has become my world, the creators my neighbors.
My life consists of hollow lessons, of thoughts
that are shared superficially, of misleading titles.
Empty and Tense Students? Maybe that’s what it
really stands for, and it’s some conspiracy led by
Susan and the Marxists in their fourth floor headquarters.
Or maybe it is when 4a.m. starts to feel the same as 1a.m.
that all the crazy people begin to dream while awake,
and maybe I should end this line of thinking.

Even though the part of me that is still alive
knows that this seemingly never-ending mess
was heavily influenced by frustration and weariness,
I refuse to reject it simply because someone else will.
Instead, I place the beginning at the end of this journey:

When you criticize me
for producing waste,
remember that it is your fault
for creating a world
in which time no longer exists.
I am thankful, though,
because soon I will see
a sight I’ve never seen before:
a sunrise.

Alana Munoz