I used to rip pages out of poetry books and tape them to my walls. I’d try to grab on to each word and pull myself up and over. The walls grew higher and higher and the books eventually ran out of pages. I wrote a poem about my efforts and ripped it out of the journal that I surely would have lost someday. I taped the page to the wall. I wrote more poems and I taped them to my walls. I wrote songs that were sang by kings and queens but the tape would not stick to the songs lyrics. I wrote stories of a boy who would look but never saw and stuck the stories to the wall. I looked with my eyes and I saw the boy in the blank pages. I dug my pencil into the cemetery of lined pages. The kings and queens voices echoed in my head. The poems silence rang louder. When the pages from the journal I’d surely lose finally ran out, I stepped back and looked at my walls.

Windows.